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thedrifter
06-30-05, 04:36 AM
Balancing Security and Aesthetics
Protecting Washington landmarks from truck bombs is a monumental task.
BY LEIGH
Thursday, June 30, 2005 12:01 a.m.

WASHINGTON--On July 4 a new Washington Monument landscape that appears to strike an impressive balance between security imperatives and good design will make its public debut. Though the project can be viewed only from a distance at this writing, landscape architect Laurie Olin clearly has transformed the low, amorphous lump of turf on which the great obelisk is perched into a podium. This graceful grassy swell, elliptical in plan, adds a needed touch of formality to the setting. The design includes a network of curving pathways lined with unobtrusive 2 1/2-foot-tall retaining walls that provide seating, a new circular granite plaza centered by the monument, and hundreds of new trees on the grounds.
Mr. Olin has established a 400-foot security perimeter by placing bollards at key pathway intersections. The bollards are visually less obtrusive at this distance and will be a big improvement on the double ring of Jersey barriers--interlocking concrete slabs normally found at highway construction sites--that were placed 250 feet from the monument in 1998 at the recommendation of security consultants.

The new Washington Monument landscape is one example of the major impact that the truck bombings at the World Trade Center in 1993 and Oklahoma City in 1995, a deranged gunman's fatal 1998 shooting of two police officers inside the Capitol, and 9/11 have had on the appearance of Washington's monumental core: the Mall, Capitol Hill, the area around the White House, and the Federal Triangle complex of government office buildings.
Most of the security-driven changes in the core's physical environment--ranging from ostensibly temporary concrete planters, Jersey barriers, bicycle-fence barriers and pop-up roadway barriers to permanent bollards, hardened terrace walls and even buildings--involve protecting buildings or monuments from the threat of a bomb-laden vehicle. In the Washington Monument's case, however, the original Jersey-barrier perimeter was established also to shield the monument from a terrorist band that might try to drive up to the monument and turn it into a sniper's post.

Barriers, temporary and permanent, almost inevitably detract from the quality of streetscapes and landscapes. Their mingled profusion is particularly intense around the White House, as well as near the Capitol, and the clutter is intensified by construction projects in the monumental core.

Security perimeters vary widely, and are established by different departments and agencies. The Park Service sets them for monuments on the Mall. The National Capital Planning Commission reviews all new construction in the Federal Triangle and accepts permanent perimeters as close as 20 feet to building façades because it avoids the obstruction of sidewalks whenever possible. But the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Protective Service also has input on the security features of government buildings in the Triangle. Overlapping jurisdictions and competing interests--security vs. public access, for starters--abound.

Maybe that's for the best. Certainly that Congress is proceeding very much at will with a questionable security-driven project leads to that conclusion. This is the 580,000-square-foot Capitol Visitor Center, to be completed in 2007. It will eliminate, so far as ordinary citizens are concerned, one of Washington's great architectural experiences: walking up the magnificent central stairway of the U.S. Capitol's east front en route to the Rotunda. Visitors will now be funneled down from First Street to a new entrance and screening area and from there down further into a vast subterranean infotainment zone that includes a cafeteria, two orientation theaters, gift shops, and a 16,500-square-foot exhibition gallery designed by multimedia whiz Ralph Appelbaum.

From the main hall, visitors will see the Capitol dome through huge skylights. But they will enter the building by a stairway under the east front's central steps or by elevators. The project will also provide 170,000 square feet of new space for Congress. The final price tag? A staggering $525 million, says Sen. Wayne Allard (R., Colo.), chairman of the subcommittee on the legislative branch.

Unfortunately, there has never been serious, widespread debate about the wisdom of building a vast underground addition to the Capitol, or about adding a museum component to this living temple of our democracy, or about making the Capitol a more self-contained, isolated precinct. Here again, the news from the Washington Monument has been a lot more encouraging. In 2003, the secretary of the interior shelved the Park Service's security-driven plan to dig a long access tunnel from an expanded lodge on the east side of the monument grounds. Visitors would have had to enter the obelisk via the tunnel. Secretary Gale Norton's decision came amid mounting criticism of the scheme from the Commission of Fine Arts, preservation groups and the press.
The Park Service has marching orders to beef up perimeter security for the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, too. On three sides of the Lincoln Memorial, a granite wall nearly three feet high is being raised around the site. The closed roadway on the memorial's Mall side is now ringed by Jersey barriers. Progress has slowly been made to protect the structure from a bomb-laden vehicle approaching alongside the Reflecting Pool or at an angle across the Mall. Bollards will probably be placed at the foot of the steps connecting the roadway to the pool. Cables would be hidden amid new hedges flanking the steps, while bollards would be placed across the roadway. Review boards have been sending the Park Service back to the drawing board to restudy their plan since 2002, and the bollards will be much less conspicuous as a result.

The Jefferson Memorial poses a tougher problem. It is in a flat, grassy landscape alongside the Tidal Basin, and there are no topographical features to help establish the 400-foot security perimeter the Park Service's blast experts say the memorial's colonnaded architecture requires. The road to the memorial is now lined with Jersey barriers, which makes for a messy landscape. "The solution might be a combination of bollards and some kind of a wall that's more aesthetic," says the Park Service's John Parsons. "We don't have a solution yet."

Security construction around the White House includes the stark new Pennsylvania Avenue streetscape in front of the presidential mansion. Closed to vehicular traffic after the Oklahoma City bombing, the portion of the avenue stretching from 15th to 17th streets was redesigned by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and inaugurated last November. The avenue features two rows of bollards straddling the street at each end, a grid of large granite panels in charcoal and lighter tones for both sidewalks and roadway near 15th and 17th streets, and an unsightly brown pavement between the White House grounds and Lafayette Square.

There are granite bench-slabs and elm trees along the sidewalks, and guardhouses at the 15th and 17th street ends. A treaded black masking tape now runs along the curbs of the gridded segments because people didn't notice them and were stumbling. Mr. Van Valkenburgh's design seems not only drab but inept.

By contrast, The Smithsonian deserves high marks for opting for sensible, relatively unobtrusive permanent security elements that take account of the diverse architectural styles of its Mall museums. This project is scheduled for completion in 2010, and the Smithsonian has just started construction at its first site, the Air and Space Museum, which will receive a retrofit of hardened terrace walls and space-age, stainless-steel bollards that are teardrop-shaped or circular in plan, as well as several granite block-bollards whose tops will bear reliefs depicting air and space travel.

And what about the Federal Triangle office buildings? They'll probably be shielded by concrete planters for years to come.

Won't these various physical security features just compel terrorists, a notoriously adaptable lot, to adopt alternatives to truck bombing? John V. Cogbill III, chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, doesn't deny that possibility. But he and other commission officials emphasize that physical security features are just part of a broader package that includes intelligence, surveillance screening, and equipping buildings against biological and chemical agents. Mr. Cogbill adds that the security design his commission supports--Pennsylvania Avenue and the Smithsonian's Mall project being two examples he cites--promotes "psychological" as well as "physical" security. The idea is to find features that are perceptibly calibrated to the threat a building or monument faces without creating the impression of a city under siege.
The fact remains that, on the whole, the urgent security concerns of the past decade have made this city of magnificent vistas a bit less magnificent.

Mr. Leigh is at work on "Monumental America" for Spence.

Ellie