by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Thomas Vonier is a founding member of the International Center for Urban Security in Barcelona. His work on urban security set terms of debate on new security measures for city centers, beginning with a series of articles, Mean Streets: Going from Protected Enclaves and Urban Control Zones, which appeared in Urban Land (Washington, D.C.) and l'Information Immobilière (Geneva, Switzerland). Based in Europe and the U.S., Vonier’s practice provides design support for clients with global interests in project development, security, and industrial operations. He has served as an advisor to the senior management of private corporations, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide. Vonier will be a keynote speaker at the AIA Convention and Design Expo in Boston in May.

Education: I went to Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Wisconsin. I got a BArch and MArch, both from Wisconsin.

Current read: I just finished rereading Kowloon Tong, which is a fiction book about the turnover of Hong Kong to mainland China. I’ve just picked up a book about Suleiman the Magnificent by Andre Clot.

Early professional career: I founded a practice on my own as soon as I got licensed. I had worked for the AIA Research Corporation when it was a separate corporation from the AIA, but still in the headquarters building, expressly to do research. I worked there for three years until I sat for the examination, passed it, got my license, and then I went out on my own here in Washington, D.C.

Interest in designing for security: There was a big explosion at an annex to the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the mid-1980s. George Shultz, secretary of state at the time, vowed that they would do everything they could to strengthen their buildings. I was doing some security work for a private client overseas and was chosen to head a study that was funded by the State Department. It took a year and a half and cost several million dollars to look at what they could do to the buildings that they already had and what they could do for new buildings to improve security and prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I did that study with a group of people and then went on to work on several specific embassies and generally for the State Department.

Security in the next 5 to 10 years: What I hope is that there will be more of a focus on urban security and on what I call secure enclaves and urban control zones, so that groups of buildings and areas of cities are generally made easier to police and patrol—so that there isn’t a lot of redundancy in systems for buildings that are in particular parts of the city.

What I have in mind is similar to what they’ve done around the White House. They’ve extended the control zone quite far, partly by closing Pennsylvania Avenue, but lots of other things have been done around the perimeter of the federal area to make it easier for patrolling and monitoring by police authorities. That’s really helped to improve security for all buildings within the zone. Similar things have been done in the London’s financial district and in Paris around the Élysée Palace, which also is close to the Interior Ministry and lots of other important government buildings.

A group of colleagues and I are trying to promote the idea that more should be done at the urban scale to control access and facilitate the necessary public policing functions. It’s very difficult in gridded American cities, because it’s difficult to control vehicular access. If you look at federal court buildings in downtown areas now, they tend to be stand-alone islands. I would wager that’s not as effective as trying to control the larger areas, and it’s not just for purposes of counterterrorism. There are lots of other threats to security, including flooding and urban riots that we’ve seen in recent years that can be helped by a more comprehensive approach.

Current work in Lagos, Nigeria: I’m working on a hotel project there with a group of architects. Lagos is no longer the capital, but it’s the largest city. Like so many places in the world, it has literally millions of people who’ve emigrated from other parts of the country into the city, so there’s a great deal of poverty. There’s squatting and very little infrastructure to support the population. Even though the country is wealthy in terms of natural resources and revenues it earns on oil, among other things, that really hasn’t reached the urban infrastructure. Everything has to be brought in from other places. There is almost no public electricity. There are no public sewers. There’s no running water, so all of that has to be provided on site with generators and independent septic systems and water supplies. And all of that has to be heavily protected, surrounded by walls, and patrolled.

How do international issues influence design in the U.S.? I think every corporation that’s been involved with the conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan has of course taken measures to improve security in domestic facilities. In general, I think companies that do business with the government, and particularly with the military, have always been sensitive to security matters. What’s different now may be the greater involvement of private corporations in providing logistical and other kinds of support, which perhaps has exposed those companies more in the international environment than had been the case previously.

As far as design issues are concerned, I would say that most businesses and government institutions are there to deal with the general public on some level, so there’s always a tension between the requirements for security and trying to convey the impression that a place is open, accessible, and to some degree even welcoming. That’s a difficult balance to achieve in many cases.

Municipalities can do many things to improve their posture for civil preparedness that spans a range of threats and problems, including terrorism, extreme weather, civil unrest, industrial accidents, and even concerns like avian flu and widespread epidemics. I’ve been working with a group in Barcelona to try to get municipalities all around the world—starting with European cities—to make better expenditures for public security. We’ve seen examples of extreme weather all over the world, from tsunamis to rising sea levels in Scandinavia. There are all sorts of things that can be done at the urban scale to improve the posture of a city in dealing with these factors.

We’re looking at past experiences and history including the civil defense shelters that were very common in the United States in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, as well as a range of new technologies such as better weather monitoring and systems that allow police and civil authorities to take stock of what’s occurring. After the London bus and subway bombings, for example, a great deal was done with video systems in London to improve their ability to detect suspicious behavior. There’s a range of new things that can be done to make the job easier for policing and monitoring; not all of it uncontroversial, but I think that’s the price that’s paid.

What should architects be doing to improve security? There’s been a lot of attention paid to the collapse of the World Trade Center, and I think a good deal has been learned about the behavior of structural systems in what are essentially war-like conditions or attacks that are at the scale of war. I’m not sure that has a lot of applications in ordinary civil life. I guess I’ve been on the side of people who say you can’t design a public building or something that’s intended to serve civilian purposes to be able to withstand attacks on that scale. It’s just not a practical matter. It’s not reasonable, so I think what architects really should be doing is trying to understand how, within the vocabulary of ordinary structural design and the many other demands that face clients, they can do things that will improve security. That could include making it easier for personnel to monitor the facility and surrounding area or harking back to ideas that Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman had on how to promote a proprietary interest in public space. How do you make people feel as if they’re responsible for watching public areas and paying attention to what’s going on? I think those are architectural and design questions.