There's an Art to Security When Landscape Designers Are Asked to Foil Attacks
24 June
2004:
Sculpture, Decorative Bollards, Trees Serve to Deter Would-Be Bombers
By Mark Maremont
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BOSTON - the 11-meter-long, bifurcated chunk of black granite in front
of the FleetBoston tower here strikes many passersby as just one more
baffling example of modern art.
“It looks like a kayak, or maybe a broken boat,” says Boston lawyer
Michael Litchman. “Honestly, I have no idea what it is”.
No wonder Mr. Litchman is puzzled. He's looking at a new phenomenon in
the American urban landscape; security disguised as art. The massive
sculpture, carefully placed in front of the shallow main stairs, is
intended to keep a terrorist from driving into the skyscraper's lobby
with a bomb.
After the Oklahoma City bombing and the Sept. 11 attacks, worried
building owners threw up rows of concrete highway barriers and mammoth
planters around many office buildings. But since it's clear that
security concerns aren't going away, corporate and public officials
have begun to seek more aesthetically pleasing shields.
Decorative bollards, crash-proof benches and modern-day moats are
blending into the American cityscape almost unnoticed. In the process,
they have created a new subspecialty for architects, engineers and
landscape designers - all of whom now must be as well versed in
“antiram rating levels” and “standoff distances” as they are in
elementary drafting.
In Seattle, a new 20-story federal courthouse scheduled to open this
summer comes with a thicket a cleverly hidden protection. A perimeter
of sweet gum trees, concrete benches and stainless steel bollards forms
the first line of defense. Should a suicide car bomber smash through
those, he would face two options: Try to ford a “waterlily pond” that
doubles as a security moat, or navigate through a grove of 80 trees
carefully staggered to prevent a vehicle from getting a clear shot at
the main entrance.
Then there's the sunken sculpture garden, designed both to please the
eye and trap a vehicle in the soft grass. Even the building's sign is
part of the security system: six meters long and made of stone, it
forms part of the western perimeter.
“If something does happen and they're able to break through all that,
they have to figure out how to get up 18 feet (five meters) of steps,”
says Rick Thomas, the building's project manager.
The intertwining of security and architecture is a throwback to
antiquity. From medieval English castles to the Great Wall of China,
structures throughout history have been built with defense in mind.
Only in relatively recent times have cities and buildings been
constructed on the assumption that they were safe from attack.
Many new building perimeters are designed to keep vehicles at what
security types call a safe “standoff distance” - preventing the
nightmare scenario of a truck bomb penetrating into a modern tower's
vulnerable core, where an explosion could trigger a catastrophic
collapse.
Curt Betts, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blast expert, says a large
vehicle bomb produces just one-eighth as much blast force on a building
from 15 meters away as it doe from 7.5 meters. Moving to 30 meters cuts
that to just 2 %.
But how best to keep vehicles away? Despite the popularity of the
concrete highway barriers - also known as Jersey barriers - they are
inadequate and unsightly, in Mr. Bett's opinion.
Enter the bollard. Commonly the strong posts on a pier or wharf for
holding fast a ship's mooring cable, the term bollard now also refers
to the waist-high pillars that have become the barrier of choice around
many buildings. Anchored as much as a meter into the ground with U.S.
government standards requiring them to halt a truck going 80 kilometers
per hour.
Bollard makers now report a lot of demand for better-looking bollards.
“Bollards can be beautiful,” asserts the Web site of Delta Scientific
Corp., a Valencia, California, manufacturer of security barriers. The
company, which says business has grown three-fold since Sept. 11, has
added a line f “designer bollards,” including fluted ones that mimic
ancient Greek columns, and others with a vaguely Victorian touch.
Delta's bollard customers include the U.S. State Department and the
National Archive building in Washington and the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
A rival firm, SecureUSA Inc., in Atlanta, designed bollards shaped like
giant gold balls for an 18-hole course at a military base. Then there's
the gorilla bollard, a crouching fiberglass simian with four steel
pillars hidden inside its arms and legs, installed at a theme park that
the company declines to name. “To a kid, it just looks like a fun thing
to climb on,” says Bevan Clark, SecureUSA's president. “But it could
stop a Ringling Brothers truck carrying a real gorilla going 30 miles
an hour.”
Bollards are the main perimeter security at the new Oklahoma City
federal building, officially dedicated in May to replace the one bombed
in 1995. Those by the front entrance are hidden inside much larger
cylinders of perforated metal. At night, lights inside the devices make
them glow like luminaria, the popular Mexican and Southwestern
Christmas decoration of candle-lit paper bags weighted with sand.
“They really are fun,” says the building's architect, Carol Ross
Barney. “We used what could have been something oppressive and turned
it into something a bit whimsical.”
High-security landscaping also is in vogue. For the plaza of the
federal courthouse in Minneapolis, landscape architect Martha Schwartz
designed a series of chest high earthen mounds. They should be almost
impossible to drive over. But if car bomber tries, he will get a nasty
surprise: The plaza surface is designed to collapse into a void below
if a vehicle drives onto it.
A dramatic new federal courthouse building in Miami, designed by the
firm Arquitectonica, will use one of the simplest and most effective
security barriers of all elevation. Built on a plateau, it will be
bordered by a concrete retaining wall doubling as a bench. Surrounding
the plateau will be a botanical garden planted with vehicle deterring
mature trees. Yet a third layer of deterrence will come in the form of
an earth sculpture on top of the plateau, made of undulating mounds 1.2
meters to 1.5 meters high.
Not all security ideas work out. A moat like water feature for a new
San Francisco federal building was scrapped because of concerns that
homeless people might bathe in it. Federal officials designing new
protection for the Jefferson Memorial thought briefly about bollards in
the shape of tiny Thomas Jefferson but dismissed the ideas as silly.
Nowhere has perimeter security been more a concern than in Washington,
large parts of which have taken on the look of a military bunker. The
National Capital Planning Commission, the U.S. government's
urban-planning arm for the District of Columbia, was so upset about the
ugly and often frightening fortifications it devised a sweeping “urban
design and security plan” for the city.
One of the agency's first projects is already under way: Replacing the
Jersey barriers now circling the Washington Monument with gentle,
oval-shaped walls built of granite but with a rustic look.
A longer-range plan is to get rid of what the commission calls, “bunker
pots” - out size, concrete urns lining some of Washington's historic
avenues. In their place would go “hardened street furniture,” including
special benches and reinforced decorative lampposts. Even the bumble
Washington trash can is supposed to morph into a security device.
“All it really is, is a bollard-shaped element with a trash can sleeve
over it,” says Elizabeth Miller, project manager for the urban security
plan.
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