It used to be that Washington, D.C., architecture consisted of graceful Georgetown mansions, neoclassical federal buildings—and, of course, the monuments. When the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was founded in 1910 to guide Washington’s architectural development, it reviewed designs such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Federal Triangle. However, during the seven years I’ve served on the commission, an increasing amount of time is spent discussing security improvement projects: screening facilities, hardened gatehouses, Delta barriers, perimeter fences, and seemingly endless rows of bollards. We used to mock an earlier generation that peppered the nation’s capital with Civil War generals on horseback; now I wonder what future generations will make of our architectural legacy of crash-resistant walls and blast-proof glass.
How did we become so insecure about our buildings? Although the September 11, 2001, attacks loom large in the public’s imagination, the event that changed the way federal buildings in America are designed and used—perhaps forever—was a presidential directive issued six years earlier. Historically, U.S. presidents have shown little interest in architecture. You can count the exceptions on one hand: Franklin D. Roosevelt, who designed his own presidential library; Theodore Roosevelt, who had many architect friends and added the West Wing to the White House; and of course America’s two great architect-presidents, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Mostly, however, presidents have preferred to leave design to designers, whether of public buildings, war memorials, or double eagles. President Bill Clinton, whose most prominent addition to the White House was a hot tub, was not known as an architecture buff. But by issuing Executive Order 12977 in October 1995, he set in motion a process that thrust politics squarely into the center of design.
The executive order was the result of the Oklahoma City bombing. The day after the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building, which claimed 168 lives and injured more than 680 people, Clinton directed the Department of Justice to assess the vulnerability of all federal facilities to acts of violence. The resulting report, prepared by a large team headed by the U.S. Marshals Service, is generally known as the Marshals Report. To implement the report’s recommendations, Executive Order 12977 established an interagency security committee charged with developing standards for all federal facilities as well as “long-term construction standards for those locations with threat levels or missions that require blast-resistant structures.”
The Marshals Report classified all federal buildings according to rising levels of threat. The Murrah Building, which had 550 employees and housed ATF and DEA offices, would have been Level IV, a high-risk category that includes federal courthouses and all large federal office buildings, as well as ATF, DEA, and FBI offices. Level V is reserved for the highest-risk agencies such as the Department of Defense, the CIA, and Homeland Security.
Because the authors of the Marshals Report were security experts, they focused on the immediate security problem—that is, safeguarding the occupants of federal buildings against explosives and other domestic threats. It is hard to question the good intention of protecting federal employees. However, as bombings in Madrid and Oslo later showed, terrorism does not confine itself to official targets; hardening government buildings simply moves the threat elsewhere. It is like deciding to protect only the flight crew rather than safeguarding the plane and all its passengers.
The Marshals Report proposed no fewer than fifty-two specific criteria, which resulted in the deployment of a host of building security devices. Some, such as reinforced structure, blast-resistant glass, and hardened curtain walls, have a small impact on a building’s appearance. That is not the case with perimeter security.
“Depending on the facility type,” the report cautions, “the perimeter may include sidewalks, parking lots, the outside walls of the building, a hallway, or simply an office door.” Because truck bombs are the simplest and cheapest way of creating large detonations, and given what happened in Oklahoma City, the focus has been on keeping vehicles far away from their target by creating a so-called standoff distance. The optimal standoff is large—at least a hundred feet—and new buildings, such as the ATF headquarters in Washington, D.C., achieve this setback by creating a sort of landscaped demilitarized zone between the building and the street. The Marshals Report came out at a time when the federal agency with the greatest experience of terrorism was the State Department, which had developed its expertise hardening diplomatic buildings abroad in the wake of several embassy bombings. This may explain why federal buildings are protected as if they were divorced from their surroundings and why so many federal buildings today, surrounded by barricades and layers of security, resemble foreign outposts.
Existing urban buildings are generally near the street. The only alternative to closing a street completely—as with Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House—is to keep the potential truck bomber from driving right up to the building. This is achieved by a device that could serve as a symbol for our insecurity: the bollard.
Bollards are hardly new—Baroque Rome was full of them. But the attractive marble bollards that Bernini placed in St. Peter’s Square or those that prevented carriages from driving into his fountain in the Piazza Navona are a far cry from the security bollards of today. Old bollards were typically low enough to make a convenient seat and were spaced far apart, sometimes linked by chains. Cast-iron bollards were installed by nineteenth-century Dutch townspeople in front of their houses, but those decorative so-called Amsterdammertjes (little Amsterdammers) were not intended to stop a speeding truck, only to discourage driving on the sidewalk.
Modern post–Oklahoma City bollards are not delicate. Designed to halt a fifteen-thousand-pound vehicle going fifty miles per hour, they are big: eight to ten inches in diameter, typically three feet high, and spaced no more than four feet apart, according to current standards. A large, block-size building might be encircled by several hundred of these oversize fireplugs. To reduce the monotony, architects have tried mixing in hardened fences, low walls, planters, and reinforced benches and light poles. However, when a security line occurs at the curb, as is usually the case, solid barriers are impractical because people need to be able to exit cars, so bollards remain the chief perimeter protection. Whether they are clad in stainless steel or granite, they are a visual intrusion on the streetscape; they also pose a nuisance for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Some agencies don’t seem to mind this intrusion, as it’s an external marker of their buildings’ strategic importance. In Washington, we’ve come to see the bizarre phenomenon that one federal official characterized to me as “bollard envy,” where the degree of protection becomes a symbol of bureaucratic status, like a choice parking spot or a corner office.
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Government officials regularly speak of integrating perimeter security “unobtrusively” into the design of a building. A rare case where this has been achieved is the landscape improvement to the Washington Monument. Designed by the Olin landscape architecture firm, the perimeter security is disguised as a set of curving stone retaining walls, which are invisible from the monument itself and are designed to be sat upon. A similar retaining wall provides security for the Lincoln Memorial, although here the topography requires additional intrusive bollards as well.
The security plan being designed for the Jefferson Memorial will depend on walls as well as scores of bollards. Where to put the perimeter security is a Hobson’s choice: put it farther away and you need more bollards; nearer and you need fewer, but they are more visually intrusive. In either case, the experience of John Russell Pope’s handsome building will not be enhanced. The directive to secure the Jefferson Memorial is intended to protect a precious national icon. It may end up having the opposite effect.
The Marshals Report did not mention the potential architectural impact of new security standards, but simply assumed that the criteria would be met—somehow. That “somehow,” after sixteen years of the war on terrorism, has generally come at the expense of aesthetics. Standards, whether they govern the precise height of bollards or the minimum dimension of standoffs, tend to be inviolable and leave little discretion to the designer. And because everyone (at least everyone inside the same risk-class building) must have the same level of protection, there can be no exceptions. Most building design decisions are trade-offs—between cost and benefit, maintenance and durability, and appearance and performance. Security—“Are you ready to risk a life?”—brooks no compromises.
And yet if that question were answered by citizens instead of by security consultants, the response might be different. Most of the decisions regarding building security have been the result of executive-branch directives, either from the president or from department heads, rather than from Congress. These decisions are not the result of public debate. The possibility of an open discussion about security—for example, when is too much, too much?—is further constrained by the necessary veil of secrecy that surrounds the subject. After all, security measures are intended to foil terrorists—whether foreign or domestic—and revealing too many details defeats the purpose.
Herein lies the problem. The design of public buildings today is usually subject to review by design boards, municipal arts councils, neighborhood associations, and various community groups. But security concerns, which can greatly affect building design, are “off the table.” Instead of reasoned discussion by citizens and their representatives, debate is stifled by the unarguable pronouncements of security experts.
Last year, the Supreme Court decided that the public would no longer be able to ascend Cass Gilbert’s iconic marble steps to enter the Supreme Court Building. Instead, visitors would be redirected to a side door leading to a screening facility. Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the change unfortunate and unjustified, and Breyer pointed out that no other high court in the world has closed its front entrance over security concerns. He said that the main entrance and the front steps of the 1935 building “are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the court itself.”
But Breyer and Ginsburg were in the minority. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who supported the closure, told the House Appropriations Subcommittee that from a security perspective entering from the side is “mandatory.” According to ABC News, Kennedy said that the court spent millions of dollars on an updated security facility “but decided, after talking to experts, that visitors no longer should be able to enter through the main front entrance.” Once more, the experts carried the day.
Users of airports know that security can vary: one year liquids are forbidden, another year not; sometimes belts and shoes must be removed, sometimes not. The trouble with our misguided hardening of federal buildings is that it is not as easily reversed: the intrusive bollards and screening centers will remain for a long time, becoming our generation’s architectural legacy.