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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.

But to date, the city's trees have been among the most noticeable victims of the security buildup. Verdant avenues and promenades that once gave Washington so much of its natural beauty and identity have been felled in the name of national defense. At the Capitol building last year, 68 trees from the city's historic landscape design were chopped down to create an access point for a new underground bunker and visitor center built beneath the Capitol. Jeff Lee, principal with landscape architecture firm Lee & Associates in Washington, D.C., argues that the cost of security should be weighed not just in dollars but for its cultural impact as well. "It's like the MasterCard ad," he says. "A commercial steel bollard: $3,000. A concrete footing: $20,000. The 60-year-old American elm that graces Independence Avenue: priceless."

The resurrection of greenery in Washington can be found in the Van Valkenburgh design for Pennsylvania Avenue. It's a wonderful example of balancing security measures with aesthetics (for more on this, see "The Architect," Page 36). Part of the NCPC's plan for the rest of the city is to surround trees with hardened street furnishings and place posts around some tree pits to give added protection.

But in weighing the threat of terrorism against all the costs of hardening and protecting a building or monument, the landscape architects and security experts are floating around another somewhat treasonous ideathat is, to do nothing. While Moore notes that areas such as the White House and Capitol must be secured, he scoffs at the notion that every monument and memorial should receive the same treatment. "People don't live and work in them," he says. "They are objects. And if they are damaged, we can build them back.

"There's a very low percentage of possibility that somebody would attack the Jefferson Memorial, but there is a 100 percent certainty that all these things we're putting in will disfigure it," he adds. "We shouldn't be shooting to be totally safe. Total safety is an illusion."

While architects and security experts agree that a middle ground between safety and aesthetic beauty does indeed exist, the challenge of reaching it in Washington's fickle political climate is far from over. With a great deal of government bureaucracy still to wade through, Washington denizens may have to live with the barricades a while longer. But the NCPC hopes that when its security design work in Washington is finally completed, the result will be a teaching tool for public and private institutions around the country. "A fish stinks from the head," says Friedman. "If we can show others how to [implement security] properly and beautifully in Washington, that will have a huge ripple effect." If the project is a success, it will stand as an example of how much can be achieved when security, design and common sense come together.