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Security Design and Architecture: Hidden Strengths

Does security have to be as ugly as a jersey barrier? Or can it be both effective and attractive? Planners in the nation's capital are putting well-designed security to the test.

"Security creep" is how one Washington insider puts it. "Over the last 15 years, more and more security devices have been employed in a helter-skelter fashion without any coordination or careful thinking about the impact," says Richard Friedman, whom President Clinton appointed in 2000 to chair the NCPC's interagency task force on security design.

In the early 1990s, lines of thick cement bollards were erected like giant teeth along the Pennsylvania Avenue curb, presenting a stark contrast to the graceful Federalist style White House fence behind them. Security was ratcheted up again after the Oklahoma City bombing, when Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to traffic, creating a vast concrete no-man's-land bordered by jersey barriers and makeshift guardhouses. The White House answered public protest of the changes with promises to seek more aesthetically pleasing long-term solutions. But, predictably, those initiatives eventually became bogged down in Washington bureaucracy.

Then came September 11.

At the White House, and elsewhere in and around Washington, bollards, planters, jersey barriers, metal crowd-control stands and even sewer pipes sprouted as omnipresent street fixtures. They were piled haphazardly along curbs, in thoroughfares, across sidewalks and in front of steps in a panicked effort to protect vulnerable buildings and historic monuments from the threat of bomb-laden vehicles, the delivery method of choice for the vast majority of terrorist attacks. Although some of these barriers create a necessary distance between vulnerable buildings and the roads nearby, many have been plopped on random street corners where they seemingly protect nothing, or in front of sculptures and buildings that are unlikely targets for terrorism. "In the short term, [the buildup] is understandable, even laudable," says Martha Droge, a landscape designer and urban planner with Ayers, Saint, Gross in Baltimore. "[The government] threw as many resources as it could manage at the problem, but doing so sent a poor message to visitors about our quality of life and sense of confidence in the country."

In typical Washington style, the degree of visible security protection outside a building has even become a bit of a status symbol. "I don't know whether the Agriculture Department needs to be totally fortified," muses noted architect Arthur Cotton Moore, who has protested the security blockades that have sprung up around the city. "Terrorism is a PR effort; [terrorists] are going to go after the most dramatic thing they can hitwhich is probably not the Department of Health and Human Services."

However, the overreaction to the terrorism threat did have one positive result: It infused with new energy the campaign for a more sensible and discreet approach to security design in Washington. In November 2001, for example, the NCPC task force released a series of recommendations for improving security and urban design in the city's Monumental Core, and followed that up with a comprehensive plan for achieving those recommendations in October 2002. For Friedman, the key to breaking through the bureaucracy was getting all the various stakeholders including the Secret Service, FBI and CIA together in one room and get them talking in a confidential setting. "It was a matter of asking them, What are you afraid of?" says Friedman, and then stepping back and deciding how to design for those fears. The task force provided its recommendations to landscape architecture companies and asked them to submit proposals for many of the city's famous sites.Moats Are BackAt a time when physical security is increasingly a technology-driven function, it's interesting to note that many of the innovative landscape security design proposals are distinctly medieval in concept. For example, the sunken walkways that will surround the Washington Monument are derived from old agricultural devices called ha-has. Historically, landowners used these walled ditches to keep the animals on their property from reaching the house without disturbing the landscape's visual continuity. From a distance, the ditches aren't even visible. Another design that has been given new life by security-minded landscape architects is the tank trap, a low ditch that prevents small and large vehicles from reaching a building. Frequently they are filled with water to provide an attractive feature on a property (you might recognize the concept as a moat).