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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.

May 01, 2003 — CSO — The stately white mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has survived fire, scandal and an attack by the British. Someone even crashed a small plane into its facade. All the while, "America's House" has sat, just yards away from its citizens, as a powerful symbol of the freedom and accessibility of democratic government. But in recent years, a wave of security threats has added layer upon layer of visual armor to the grounds and surrounding streets. Now the once elegant White House, like much of Washington, D.C., resembles a cluttered, battle-weary fortress, apprehensive and unreachable.

But even as security threats continue to multiply, signs of a more touchable terrain are emerging in Washington. A new initiative spearheaded by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) is putting forward the almost treasonous idea that security and historic urban design can coexisteven complement one another. The commission's $878 million "Urban Design and Security Plan" focuses on restoring the beauty, grandeur and accessibility to areas such as the White House, the Washington Monument and the Federal Triangle, which all have been blighted by jersey barriers and bollards in the recent "siege-chic" approach to security. The plan solicits proposals for ways to build security into the landscape in subtler ways that still provide an obvious deterrent to a terrorist but become virtually invisible to the average visitor.

The concentration of high-risk iconography in such a small area makes Washington the ideal test bed for what security and landscape design can achieve together. But the NCPC's project is about a lot more than urban beautification. It's founded on the notion that security doesn't have to look and feel so oppressive. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, so many of the security measures at airports, national landmarks and public gathering places that are aimed at making citizens saferor at least making them feel saferhave had the opposite effect. How many people truly feel reassured by the sight of an antiaircraft missile launcher parked next to the Washington Monument?

"The fundamental paradox in security is that it seldom makes you feel secure," says Richard Farson, president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. "When you have armed guards going through baggage at the airport and the government is issuing alerts, people become very anxious and afraid. But safety measures can be unobtrusive. People don't even have to know they exist."

Good securityand by that we mean the measure most likely to prevent a breachis about balancing the visible and the invisible; deterring the criminal without scaring off the public at large. That's the real challenge of the work currently being done in the nation's capital. And the success or failure of that effort will have a tremendous impact on everyone's collective expectations for how security should look and feel in the future.The Bollardization OF D.C.It's been said that if you had a dollar for every bollard in Washington, you'd be pretty flush. But those squat, reinforced concrete posts that dot the entries to forbidden roadways now share the city's streetscape with still uglier jersey barriers and oversized concrete planters. The security threats of the past year and a half have certainly elicited a noticeable buildup in street-side fortifications, but the changes to the city's landscape have actually happened more gradually.