While visiting DC recently, I couldn’t help but notice the ubiquitous planters — concrete planters, heavy and solid enough to stop a suicide bomber in a truck. Disguising Security As Something Artful discusses other examples:
In Seattle, a new 20-story federal courthouse scheduled to open this summer comes with a thicket of cleverly hidden protection. A perimeter of sweet gum trees, concrete benches and stainless-steel bollards forms the first line of defense. Should a suicide car bomber smash through those, he would face two options: Try to ford a ‘waterlily pond’ that doubles as a security moat, or navigate through a grove of 80 trees carefully staggered to prevent a vehicle from getting a clear shot at the main entrance.
Then there’s the sunken sculpture garden, designed both to please the eye and trap a vehicle in the soft grass. Even the building’s sign is part of the security system: Twenty feet long and made of stone, it forms part of the western perimeter.
“If something does happen and they’re able to break through all that, they have to figure out how to get up 18 feet of steps,” says Rick Thomas, the building’s project manager.
A good point:
The intertwining of security and architecture is a throwback to antiquity. From medieval English castles to the Great Wall of China, structures throughout history have been built with defense in mind. Only in relatively recent times have cities and buildings been constructed on the assumption that they were safe from attack.
Bomb blasts follow the inverse-cube law, so keeping them at a safe “standoff distance” pays off:
Many new building perimeters are designed to keep vehicles at what security types call a safe “standoff distance” — preventing the nightmare scenario of a truck bomb penetrating into a modern tower’s vulnerable core, where an explosion could trigger a catastrophic collapse.
Curt Betts, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blast expert, says a large vehicle bomb produces just one-eighth as much blast force on a building from 50 feet away as it does from 25 feet. Moving to 100 feet cuts that to just 2%.
So, what’s a bollard?
Commonly the strong posts on a pier or wharf for holding fast a ship’s mooring line, the term bollard now also refers to the waist-high pillars that have become the barrier of choice around many buildings. Anchored as much as five feet into the ground, with a steel core, the toughest bollards meet U.S. government standards requiring them to halt a truck going 50 miles per hour.
Bollard makers now report a lot of demand for better-looking bollards. “Bollards can be beautiful,” asserts the Web site of Delta Scientific Corp., a Valencia, Calif., manufacturer of security barriers. The company, which says business has grown three-fold since Sept. 11, has added a line of “designer bollards,” including fluted ones that mimic ancient Greek columns, and others with a vaguely Victorian touch. Delta’s bollard customers include the State Department and the National Archive building in Washington and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
A rival firm, SecureUSA Inc., in Atlanta, designed bollards shaped like giant golf balls for an 18-hole course at a military base. Then there’s the gorilla bollard, a crouching fiberglass simian with four steel pillars hidden inside its arms and legs, installed at a theme park that the company declines to name. “To a kid, it just looks like a fun thing to climb on,” says Bevan Clark, SecureUSA’s president. “But it could stop a Ringling Brothers truck carrying a real gorilla going 30 miles an hour.”
Bollards are the main perimeter security at the new Oklahoma City federal building, officially dedicated in May to replace the one bombed in 1995. Those by the front entrance are hidden inside much larger cylinders of perforated metal. At night, lights inside the devices make them glow like luminaria, the popular Mexican and Southwestern Christmas decoration of candle-lit paper bags weighted with sand.