Grassroots attendees received two golden opportunities to learn about and discuss security design issues on March 6. First, noted New York architect Frances Halsband, FAIA, partner, R.M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects, shared her experiences with federal-building design and offered a range of components to be considered in creating safe and beautiful environments. Halsband was then joined by a panel of distinguished experts for an interactive debate on how architects can balance security with openness and aesthetics.

Halsband: “Our primary goal is to create a safe environment”
Halsband addressed the topic of “Contemplating the Unknown: Trends and Predictions for Protecting the Built Environment in a Society at Risk.” She said there is no doubt that the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in 1998, and the attacks of September 11 have brought security to the forefront of our collective design consciousness. In preparing this talk, however, she came to the realization that “protecting the built environment in a society at risk” probably wasn’t the best framework for discussion among architects.

“We’re not here to protect buildings, we’re here to protect society when the built environment is at risk,” Halsband declared. “Our primary role is to create a safe environment.” She believes that our creativity as architects will lead us to good solutions for protecting society. Such efforts will require collaboration. Redesigning Ground Zero is proof of that, she said. “At least we are working together—that’s a giant step.” The timing is right because society in general is getting more collaborative, in large part due to the widespread and wide-reaching Internet.

Halsband offered the audience a short history-lesson slide show of security, starting back a millennium or two to the walled cities and sites. We have to ask ourselves, she said, if this kind of fortress-like design is who we are and who we want to be. “Do we really want to say that some people belong within the wall and some don’t?” she asked. We have to realize, she said, that who we are as a society of late has been fairly free and open. “Today—after 1995, 1998, and 9/11, are we still as open a society?”

The knee-jerk reactions of completely shutting down and walling off, which immediately followed 9/11, have now been mitigated, in Halsband’s opinion. We’re also past the next wave of reaction, which was designing “ferocious” architecture, and are ready for more rational dialogue. “Are the five colors of alert our design statement?” Halsband asked. “Or can we say, ‘we can do better.’”

We can do better
Halsband then presented a plethora of potential partis for architects to consider as we begin to explore the elements of secure design:
• Location: Do we want to settle in cities or scatter in the countryside? Maybe we can examine some plans that can combine the best of both, such as cityside roof gardens.
• Setbacks: The “30-meter setback” around a federal building, which has become the standard for securing buildings. “With a 30-meter setback, will everything be okay?” Halsband asked. “I don’t know.”
• Wall standards: The 3-meter-tall wall around federal buildings—like the setback, Halsband wondered if the “standard” wall will make everything okay.
• Beautiful walls: Walls can designed to be beautiful, Halsband reminded the audience, citing the work of Luis Barragan. “That’s where architects come in,” she said.
• Trees: Lines of trees can just as effective barriers as walls.
• Moats: Water, currently being used in U.S. embassy design can also be effective barriers as well as soothing site elements. Think of them as water gardens surrounding buildings, Halsband said.
• Split buildings: An increasingly common solution, especially for increasing security in existing buildings, is a separate entrance building attached via a narrow and easily controlled passageway to the main building. The entrance buildings can be open and inviting, and Halsband predicts schools are going to look more like this very soon.
• Extra skin: A protective “coat of armor” surrounds the “regular” building.
• Translucent glass: Translucent panels and lots of little panes of glass can be used in lieu of more dangerous large expanses of glass.
• Grills: A decorative variation on the extra skin, grills can offer beauty and protection.
• Big, heavy doors: Big, important doors, such as those gracing cathedrals or courthouses of old, could be brought back into style and signify “security.”
• More glass the higher up you go: Increasing fenestration at higher stories reflects the reality that it is safer away from ground level.
• Curtains: On the interior, blast curtains in front of windows prevent glass and flying debris from entering the room. “It’s not women architects who are bringing curtains back to interiors, it is terrorists,” Halsband quipped.
• Security arrays: Serpentine interior walls can control entry and flow through the building and make a beautiful design statement, as Halsband demonstrated with her firm’s design of the lobby of the Federal Courthouse in Gulfport, Miss.

Halsband compared where architect now stand with security standards to where we were with accessibility standards just over a decade ago, when the profession decried, “Oh no, what are we going to do with ramps! Our buildings will be ugly. We’re at that stage that we have to get beyond that initial response. We need to build a library of standards over time, a sort of Timesaver Standards of Security Details. We’re in this together,” Halsband concluded. “We have to share our ideas.”

Panel: “It’s a Question of balance”
Moderated by AIA Government Affairs Managing Affairs Director Rodney D. Clark, the security panel, in addition to Halsband, included
• F. Joseph Moravec, commissioner of the U.S. General Services Administration Public Buildings Service
• Frances Halsband, FAIA
• Robert E. Farr II, Cooke Douglass Farr Lemons Ltd., Jackson, Miss.
• Harold L. Adams, FAIA, RIBA, JIA, Chair of RTKL Associates Inc.
• David Collins, FAIA, the AIA national component’s codes consultant.

Clark kicked off the discussing by asking:

What does “security”mean?
Moravec explained that the General Services Administration serves as the landlord for the federal government and, as such, deals with the gamut of individual building security issues. GSA’s paramount concern is providing a superior workspace for federal workers; a major component of which is a safe and secure workplace. The Murrah Building bombing [Oklahoma City, 1995] in a way was the 9/11 for federal buildings,” Moravec said, which has driven the federal government to get a jump on security design. “We're eager to share the knowledge we have acquired over the past eight years with the private sector.”

From a practitioner’s standpoint, Adams told how RTKL began doing security work in the mid-1980s, following the bombing of U.S. facilities in Beirut, designing embassies that required a lot of security. At the same time, RTKL was hired to examine security issues in the U.S. Capitol, a massive undertaking. After 9/11, a reexamination of the design for the Capitol found that everything the firm had previously approved was still on track. They did expand the securable perimeter around the Capitol Visitors Center, which currently is under construction. “A lot of the design is about treating visitors to the Capitol in a more humane way,” Adams explained. “It has an educational intent, although keeping people safe is always paramount.” Adams further expressed his concern for balancing security and openness in our nation's monuments and the "fortress" mentality he perceives is developing.

Farr said that his firm was working on the Mississippi State Capitol when 9/11 turned concepts of security 180 degrees. “It’s a significant challenge to ‘back into’ security for buildings already under construction.,” he said.

Collins, the architect and codes consultant, said that fortunately, in his view, most of the discussion about security to date has been on the creation of guidelines. “We're seeing sensitivity to find ways to really solve the problems—not to find cookbook solutions,” he explained.

Are we more secure?
“Many sectors are spending lots of money on security,” Clark declared. “Are we more secure?”

Moravec answered that he thinks there is a good dialogue going on about what security actually is, and that he has learned that even a fortress-like building actually can be less secure that an open, inviting-looking building. “I think you have to look at each building as a separate and distinct case,” he said. “We look at a building, identify its vulnerability, and try to craft a response that is specific to that particular building.” This process, he believes, serves as a rational way of deploying resources for security.

This is the process architects typically follow when designing a building, Adams concurred. “After 9/11, there was a tremendous amount of concern about security,” he said. “As architects, we need to learn the right questions, as well as to study products and techniques that are available in the marketplace, and evaluate how good they are.”

The threat of chemical and biological attacks is raising many new questions, Adams explained, and may be an area in which we have a head-on collision with the building codes.

Balancing act
Very few clients comprehend exactly what the problems are or look at the building as a whole, Collins said. Architects can make a difference in balancing what should be done and what can be done, cost-benefit analysis, and determining the real risk. Moravec agreed that it’s a matter of balance. “We ask our buildings to be a lot of things these days: beautiful, functional, energy-efficient, etc, and last but not least—and most expensive—secure,” he said. “Security can easily add 15 percent to the cost of the building.” The bigger problem, from a balancing point of view, is the 100 million square feet of existing buildings that need to be brought up to date and up to code. “How do you decide which buildings get more attention?” he asked.

Farr said architects on the state level are struggling with the same issue. “How do you evaluate where to put your money?” he said. “We're moving the buildings out of the Central Business District, meaning we’re disseminating rather than consolidating government,” he pointed out. “We have tremendous skills as architects to bring this discussion to light.”

What is the architects' role?
Collins believes that there are lots of responsibilities and opportunities for architects. “We need to participate in the public discussions,” he explained.

Adams zeroed in on the need for a design excellence program in the State Department, perhaps like the one that GSA now employs. Historically, he said, they have chosen many fine American architects to build their buildings. Yet for years the program has been starved for funds, generating a backlog of need. There's been an effort to change that, and the State Department, under the leadership of Maj. General (ret.) Charles Williams, has a completely new program to reorganize and catch up on the backlog of embassies around the world. State has developed three prototype designs of varying sizes that are being bid out as design/build packages. “In essence, it’s a stock plan, and cost is heavily weighted in the score,” Adams said. “Our concern is to encourage him that after he’s done a few of these, to go back a do an evaluation and see if State is really getting what it wants”

Summing up, Halsband expressed her belief that the truly creative responses to security issues are always going to be one-on-one, architects and clients working on individual projects. “I think the bigger-picture issues, such as the programming, will be settled in big groups,” she said. She also expressed a need for public dialogue on these issues and applauded the new public awareness of design brought about by rebuilding Ground Zero. “The public threw the first designs out—it’s an extraordinary reinvention of who the client is,” she declared. “The public has defined the public’s right to have good design.”

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