Un-professional handbooks: graphic standards and crime prevention through environmental design

2021-07-12T18:24:00-04:00

Like other professions, such as law and medicine, architects rely on technical publications to do our jobs. Thus, we frequently turn to volumes such as Architectural Graphic Standards, which is authored by The American Institute of Architects (AIA). Promoted by its publisher, Wiley, as “the architect’s Bible since 1932,” the $260 handbook is presented as “the written authority for architects.” Nevertheless, not all of the information presented in Graphic Standards is unbiased, or even that technically sound.

It was therefore with quite a bit of interest that I discovered, while recently leafing through my twelfth edition in search of a framing detail, that it contains a short article on “Crime Preventions through Environmental Design” (CPTED). Included in the third chapter on “Building Resiliency,” alongside “Sustainability,” “Good Practices in Resilience-Based Architectural Designs,” and “Lifecycle Considerations in Resiliency-Based Designs,” CPTED is a bit like architecture’s “Bro...

A brief history of designing secure spaces

2018-04-10T15:44:00-04:00

Can design keep you safe from crime? Architects and urbanists have been making that claim since urban crime — or the threat of it — reached crisis proportions in the 1960s. [...] But with scant evidence to support those claims, at what cost do we build “defensible space”? Architectural historian Joy Knoblauch looks back at sixty years of attempts to secure space and asks whether safety lies in the design of the built environment, in our social structures, or in our heads.

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Un-professional handbooks: graphic standards and crime prevention through environmental design

A brief history of designing secure spaces