Bolting the Doors: Design for a Secure FutureBy Jane Holtz Kay Thank you all for launching what I expect will be a compelling and, in some way, endless subject: "Placing Security and Design Issues in Context." Certainly, we have grandiose aspirations here. There is no such thing as a complete crash course in "Designing for a Secure Future" any more than there is the chance that in one day we could re-shape our lives and landscapes. In fact, to understand even one of these words - "design," "secure" or "future" - would require infinite omniscience. Even with the panelists and audience assembled by the ASLA, this task which amounts to re-considering our entire built and natural environment - inside and out, structures and surroundings, homes and offices - is daunting indeed. It is daunting, not only because of the pervasive nature of our current threats, but because, in the deepest sense, design is the sum of the way we organize our lives - how we fabricate, farm, fashion our world; how we use, dispose and re-tool the things that make our landscapes and cities - our lives - healthy or not, are subjects of plan and choice: design in the deepest sense. Above all, before we listen to our expert and, assumedly, conflicting witnesses this morning, it should be remembered, that the issues of security and design are not new. They are as old as the Great Wall of China, or, perhaps Alley Oop versus the dinosaur. However dangerous these days, these are not new threats. The menace in containers holding lethal chemicals can come from many sources, friendly or not. Hazards can stem from everyday activities as well as terrorist attacks - from the necessary waste of hospital x-rays to the questionable chemical sprays, fertilizers and polluted runoffs of factory farms. Scientists warned just last week of the threat of bio-terrorist attacks on the nation's agricultural system. But bio-attacks are even more likely to arrive via an innocent passenger jetting in from abroad or a cargo ship carrying a foreign invasive plant or insect. This subject is more than a single dreaded day's response as we acquaintances of the earth know. So, too, the danger to tall structures in our cities can come from outside forces or inside ones. How do we as designers and guardians react to all these? In the debate about protecting towers, I remember the first highrise boom. Firefighters were arguing against building anything higher than a fire truck hose and ladder could reach ... some eight stories without danger. So, too, the danger of toxic emissions lies not only in the horrors of terrorist attack but in the structure's internal contents - the asbestos, benzene, lead and mercury in our computers and furnishings, ablaze or not. The questions faced by our disparate speakers and you as audience are not easy. The National League of cities offers a 36-page guidebook for bedside readers (or maybe just narcoleptics). As the documents pile high, we need to think deep, as well as wide. "Wouldn't it be better to spend our money hiring language teachers for the CIA or computer tutors to instruct the FBI," asked a colleague, "rather than contractors with hard stuffs to fortify our front doors?" "How about a white flag over Iraq?" he suggested. Nonetheless, none of us are truly skeptics about today's dangers. None of us were immune to 9/11's horrors and our future. I still blanch when I looked out my window and watch planes passing by the tall glass tower of Boston's John Hancock. I felt relieved when the teachers at my three-year old grandson's Paris school pulled down the American flag. Safer but sadder. Equally, I found out that none of these threats are truly new when my other daughter told me - for the first time, I might add - that threats had come to her office in the form of hate letters with powder labeled "anthrax" long before the problems took on a new menace. We all live or adapt to threats, new and old in our lives, as well. From x-ray scanners at our high schools to closed circuit television cameras in our parking lots. Each new device becomes helpful for some, a disquieting part of our landscape for others. In common, we share the thesaurus definition of security - confidence, sanctuary, safekeeping; we seek today's professional expertise in both "safety measures" and architectural niceties. Yet as builders as much as protectors - as human beings who want physical, political and social comfort moving about the world - we have some discomfort lest this Big Brother watch us too closely. We feel dismay when agents of security tear down Olmsted's capitol landscape to quote "protect" the citizenry. I was speaking with an architect the other day. She had designed the new fortified perimeter of a much-cherished civic building in my town a city which has the distinction of having brutalized its City Hall plaza with concrete blockades lon-g-g-g before 9/11. She described the new and graceful bollards not far away. "Actually," she added, "with security devices hidden inside them." "Ahh, clever," I thought as the visual part of my brain lit up at the ingenuous aesthetics. The light dimmed, however, as I paused to think of passing by the site - -my conversations and movements on videotape for some Dr. Strangelove snoop. Did I want anyone to know that I was combing my hair in public, playing hooky to go swimming, or dissing the governor. This omnipresent fear of terrorism has even entered our vocabulary and altered the vernacular. "Mother Nature's Terrorism," one writer described the hurricanes, blizzards and tornadoes of global warming. And, while specific terrorist make us insecure, so do - and should - the planet's environmental ills. What, then, finally is security? What is safety? Do we feel safer being frisked at the airport while our luggage goes unexamined? Do we feel safer with public barriers that keep out the crowds that might keep out bad behavior. These are part of this morning's investigation. This is not, I hope, a war of designers vs. gatelockers. Alike, we all can appreciate that eliminating destructive materials in our lives and landscapes, eliminates guarding them. More positively, we can see that some forms of protection written into law benefit us all. The legislation to provide handicap access on public transportation in my town has not only helped the technically disabled, but the baby carriage-pusher, the senior citizen and the limping athlete, temporarily disabled. Lower steps, and faster entrances and exits to streetcars, has also sped service. And, with federal money for re-building, new stations will enliven our main street and downtown. A win-win, as they say. The final question, then, is how can we best blend public security, professional design and personal freedom to create a better environment? Having posed such questions on the aesthetics of safety, the safety of safety and the aesthetics of aesthetics, I would like to turn to our three panels to answer them and then to our audience for their questions and insights on this new and overarching issue. This speech was given to introduce a daylong program on "Designing for a Secure Future" at the ASLA conference at the New York Marriott, September 26, 2002.
|