Discreet Landscapes
Laurie Olin’s graceful greenspaces are also secret security systems.
By Julie Taraska
The Metropolis Observed
April 2004
Laurie Olin has been in the landscape architecture game for over three
decades, most recent as principal of the Philadelphia-based Olin
Partnership and as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His
credits include the Vila Olympica complex in Barcelona, built in
conjunction with the 1992 Summer Olympics; New York’s Bryant Park;
and London’s Canary Wharf, King’s Cross, and Bishopsgate urban
renewal projects. As of late, he has also been sharing headlines with
his old friend Frank Gehry: The two are completing the 2.8-acre Ray and
Maria Stata Center at MIT; are part of a short-listed concern vying for
the Grand Avenue project in downtown Los Angeles; and are on Bruce
Ratner’s dream team for the proposed Atlantic Rail Yards
development in Brooklyn, which centers around a new sports arena and
mixed-use community.
Yet Olin’s practice has a quieter concern: landscape security. Long
de rigueur for state embassies, corporate campuses, and select
private residences, the field draws upon techniques of landscape
architecture to create discrete defenses against attack. Post 9-11, the
U.S. Government has embraced the approach wholeheartedly. To that point,
in January 2002, the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC) tapped
Olin Partnership as one of the three architecture landscape firms to
upgrade 10 security-sensitive districts in Washington, D.C.; among
Olin’s ongoing responsibilities are the Independence and
Constitution Street areas, as well as the Washington, Lincoln, and
Jefferson Monuments.
Metropolis Web editor Julie Taraska spoke with Olin about bombs,
bollards, and public access, and how, in this time of Homeland Security,
we can maintain safety without fencing ourselves in.
How can a landscape architect help secure an area?
It has to do with what are all the devices in your repertoire (laughs).
Some of them are very old, like fences and railings, which can stop
humans but have to be reinforced to stop vehicles; some of them are
ancient, like moats, ditches, water bodies, and ha-has, [which] are
basically dry moats.
In a landscape, we can only do a few things: We can either stop
vehicles, or people, or both, but we can’t deal with mortars or
airplanes.
As for bombing, that gets one into what are the proper
distances...For different kinds of structures, various security and
Secret Service folks have worked out the charge needed to take down a
reinforced concrete buildings is this, and for a steel one, it’s
this. You’re always looking at what will bring a structure down vs.
what will seriously damage it.
This is a lot of common sense stuff. One of the things that the Israelis
have discovered is about the most someone can strap on himself and walk
around is less than 100 pounds, including the backpack.
By the way, let me stop and say I hate all this stuff. I never want to
know any of this. But at a certain point, trying to restore the public
realm to some degree of free access and dignity, you end up having to
know about this.
That’s what intrigued me about your firm: that you do try to
balance the public and private.
We’re really trying to. And it’s really hard.
I was troubled by some of the first studies that [landscape architecture
firm] EDAW and others had done in D.C., when they took all of the street
furniture and hardened it. It was like a different version of tank
traps: All of these big planters and heavy benches.
Weren’t those elements part of the NCPC’s pre-determined
“Kit of Parts”—the tool kit of street furniture that
landscape architects could use to increase security?
That was the notion of the kit of parts. And the notion of the kit of
parts still appeals to me, as long as it’s seen as a big shopping
menu with lots of stuff. The thing is to not have the elements be too
heavy, too repetitive, or too bombastic. It’s like composing music:
when to have long straight passages, when to have little flourishes.
When do you use a cluster of bollards then a kind of low wall, then add
two planters, then do something else?
It’s how to do something where, in my opinion, the pedestrians have
free movement except when there is some building where you have to hold
them at some distance from. But really, in Washington D.C., we had a lot
of buildings that were built for stout. So we could allow pedestrians
virtually right up to the building—it’s the vehicles that
were the problem.
There were two or three serious dilemmas in D.C.: the buildings are
located a city, and there are streets. If you don’t close the
streets, then vehicles can be on the streets. And if the are vehicles on
the streets, they’re the ones with the big bombs like you just saw
in Baghdad yesterday. That truck went off with about 1000 pounds of
explosives.
There’s not much you can do about that except you can figure out
how to take the parking off the street, narrow the streets, and have a
bigger pedestrian realm; how to do railing and fences that are actually
crash barriers; and how to have gaps in between for benches, but have
the benches still be barriers.
It’s a design problem, like it used to be with handicapped ramps.
When the [Americans with Disabilities Act] was passed, we also said,
“Oh, jeez” and struggled to retrofit everything until it
became such a habit that we now start projects just knowing what to do.
It takes a certain mind shift to not think of it as a problem, but to
say, “Oh, it’s just one more thing.” You just absorb it
and it becomes part of what you do.
Do you think people are cottoning on to some of these discreet
security measures? I know the original idea was to make them
almost invisible, as to not alarm people.
Security is a funny thing. Years ago, I was working on an estate for a
client who wanted security cameras in part of the landscape. So here in
the office, we figured out how to make a security camera look like a
rock, which we were then going to place in the stone walls that we were
building for him, so that no one could tell it was a camera.
I very proudly explained it to our client, look how clever we are, and
he said, “Laurie, you don’t understand something. I want
people to know I have security cameras.” He said, “I want to
put up a pole with a thing on it, and whether it is turned on or has
film in it or is connected, I just want them to see that there is a
camera, because then they’ll think twice. It’s a
deterrent.”
And I never though of that—that some of the stuff doesn’t
work, but it discourages the more amateurish or casual people.
Is there such a thing as too much security?
We don’t want security to be oppressive and overwhelm ourselves
with a Fortress America quality, but there are reasons to want to know
what your limits are, what’s private, and, that at certain points,
there is security. But what agency head is not going to want to have a
lot of visible security, because that’s to admit that he
doesn’t think anyone cares about his agency or will attack them. So
it’s what I labeled at one meeting “security envy”:
Agency A sees Agency B do something, and then thinks “I’d
better do something, too.” Everyone tries to escalate.
That’s an issue: the business of trying to sort out levels of real
danger and security. And secure from what? Right now, people are worried
about Islamic fundamentalists who hate America. But there are other
people who go around doing terrible things.
Are we going down a path in security design from which there is no
return?
When we were working in New York recently, trying to come up for a
circle part of Columbus Circle that could get community approval and
landmarks approval and planning approval and traffic approval and Time
Warner approval—this is not a complaint, mind you, it’s just
doing business in New York—the developer for Time Warner said they
were concerned about security and wanted to have bollards around the
building. And I said, “Forget it, it doesn’t make sense.
It’s an office and residential building with a bunch of stores in
it.” But Time Warner felt that everyone hated them so much, that
they were the big commercial baddie, and so somebody was going to attack
them.
I said, “Yes, but why would they [attack you] at the ground, when
the new style
is something more dramatic in the air?” They kind of looked at me,
like I was
the devil with two horns.
In the end, it was city planning director Amanda Burden who said,
“For Christ’s Sake! If we let Time Warner do that, then every
office building in town will want to do it, and the sidewalks in New
York will be so that you can’t walk in this town. It’s
ridiculous. We can’t do it. We’ve got to stop it.” She
was pounding the table as she said this, and I thought, “Right on,
Amanda!”
Have these issues caused an increased delineation between private and
public space?
There has been a resurgence of interest in trying to throw up some sort
of line, sign, and barrier about private vs. public.
It’s an interesting thing. I was born in 1938, and the realm that I
grew up in—the Eisenhower years after the war—there was this
sort of naïve, open America that was obviously an aberration,
because the fences of the 19th century had come down and the gated
communities of the 20th century hadn’t gone up. It was this
strangely open world where everybody just wandered around innocently,
with plate glass windows and no fences and lawns uninterrupted between
houses.
But nowadays I have noticed all of these fences, hedges, and barriers
going up between houses. This is also by people who don’t go out
and use their lawns much, which I find interesting, too. So I guess
there is a
hunkering-down-in-the-dark-with-your-television-with-the-fence-outside
quality of this moment that troubles me.
But I’m a hopeless optimist. I do think a lot of things that come
as waves of bad habits can be dealt with through design and common
sense. |
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Laurie Olin integrates subtle security measures into his landscape
designs. |
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He is currently designing the landscaping for the new development at New
York’s Columbus Circle (above and below). |
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Olin’s scheme for the Washington Monument provides security without
the need for oppressive concrete Jersey barriers.
Courtesy Olin Partnership |
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