Archinect - News

New high school incorporates design elements meant to hinder active shooters

2019-08-23T15:30:00-04:00

With school shootings becoming a point of concern for many across the country, K-12 design methodologies are beginning to address the issue as well.

Fruitport High School in Fruitport, Michigan, for example, is undergoing a $48 million renovation project aimed at incorporating some of these design approaches. The new work "will add curved hallways to reduce a gunman’s range, jutting barriers to provide cover and egress, and meticulously spaced classrooms that can lock on demand and hide students in the corner, out of a killer’s sight," reports The Washington Post.

Speaking with The Washington Post, Matt Sagle of TowerPinkster, and an architect on the project, illustrated the project's "shadow zones," designed areas for students to hide in that are obstructed from a shooter's sight lines. TowerPinkster also designs prisons; Regarding the project, The Washington Post writes that Sagle "wanted to strike a balance between security and creating a welcoming presence without the pendulum ...

Lipstick on anti-terror infrastructure

2019-05-14T13:28:00-04:00

Urban designers are increasingly being tasked with an emergent ‘design challenge’ for public spaces: how best to deliver anti-terror infrastructure while generating a pleasant urban environment. By allowing themselves to be drawn into this challenge, and by dutifully working to respond with creative and constructive solutions, they are inadvertently helping to normalize a creeping ‘fortification’ of our cities that in turn contributes to a wider process of ‘bordering’ across the world.

Urbanist Alice Sweitzer and Failed Architecture editor Charlie Clemoes share their thoughts on a booming new design task, "making an increasingly aggressive urban situation more palatable to an ever more anxious citizenry."

A look at school design leading students towards prison

2018-07-25T16:13:00-04:00

In the past — or in schools with higher proportions of white students — a student acting out might garner an intervention by their principal, or a concerned teacher’s phone call to parents. But today, throughout the US, discipline in many schools has become a matter of law enforcement, rather than education. In New York, the majority of school guards — 5,000 School Safety Agents patrolling 2,300 public and private schools — are civilians employed by the School Safety Division of the NYPD.

Out of fearful reaction to school shootings and other safety concerns, many school environments look and feel like prison to the students attending. Through an extensive background on how school design has gotten to this point, "Where School Meets Prison" examines the impact prison-like design has on students and argues damaging results of higher student arrest rates and discrimination.

With a strong police presence and physical security infrastructure, student Andrea Colon shares how school design can become a pipeline to prison.

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.

A wall of bulletproof glass will soon enclose the base of the Eiffel Tower

2017-02-09T17:16:00-05:00

Following a spate of terror attacks including a machete attack last September, Parisian officials are making moves to protect the city’s many monuments. Most recently, they’ve announced that they’ll enclose the base of the Eiffel Tower with a glass wall. Currently, the area is cordoned off with a series of metal grills, which were put in place in advance of the Euro 2016 football tournament. The new, permanent wall will be 2.5 meters high and made of bulletproof glass. It will run along the Quai Branly and the Avenue Gustave-Eiffel, as well as bisect the parks on either side of the Tower. Whereas, not long ago, visitors could simply stroll through the iron legs of Paris’ most iconic monument, now they will have to pass through security checks. In total, the wall is expected to cost around €20 million.

via the Local

Geoff Manaugh takes a look inside LAX's impressive airport security apparatus

2017-01-16T20:43:00-05:00

In the summer of 2014, Anthony McGinty and Michelle Sosa were hired by Los Angeles World Airports to lead a unique, new classified intelligence unit on the West Coast. After only two years, their global scope and analytic capabilities promise to rival the agencies of a small nation-state. Their roles suggest an intriguing new direction for infrastructure protection in an era when threats are as internationally networked as they are hard to predict.

Being the world's fifth-busiest airport (74,937,004 travelers passed through LAX in 2015) makes this infrastructure megaproject one of the top-ranked terrorist and aviation targets in the country. With billions of dollars spent on the usual airport expansion and modernization projects in recent decades came also the need for enhanced anti-terrorism capabilities that gave birth to its own classified intelligence unit.

"Under the moniker of “critical infrastructure protection,” energy-production, transportation-logistics, waste-disposal, and other sites have been transformed from often-overlooked megaprojects on the edge of the metropolis into the heavily fortified, tactical crown jewels of the modern state," Manaugh writes. "Bridges, tunnels, ports, dams, pipelines, and airfields have an emergent geopolitical clout that now rivals democratically elected civic institutions."

Massive renovation of U.N. Headquarters improves security but sacrifices Hammarskjöld Library

2015-09-02T13:46:00-04:00

When the 70th regular session of the General Assembly convenes on Sept. 15, it will do so in a complex of buildings that hasn’t looked so good or felt so secure in generations. “We now have a very safe compound,” said Michael Adlerstein, [...] executive director of a seven-year, $2.15 billion renovation, known as the capital master plan, that is nearing completion. More visible than anything else is the robust yet crystalline new glass facade of the 39-story Secretariat building.

Examining the spatial crime of burglary

2015-08-12T19:50:00-04:00

Burglary is a spatial crime: its very definition requires architecture...Indeed, burglary's architectural interest comes not from its ubiquity, but from its unexpected, often surprisingly subtle misuse of the built environment. Burglars approach buildings differently, often seeking modes of entry other than doors and approaching buildings—whole cites—as if they're puzzles waiting to be solved or beaten.

Architecture of paranoia

2015-04-22T21:19:00-04:00

Since terrorism has become one of the guiding forces in urban design, the incorporation of immense fortifications into everyday streets has spawned an entire industry of defensive architecture [...] The latest developments in this rising tide of urban paranoia are on display this week at the Counter Terror Expo in west London’s Olympia, a sprawling trade show that proudly claims to showcase “the key terror threat areas under one roof”. It is an enormous supermarket of neuroses [...].

Can U.S. Embassies Be Safe Without Being Unsightly?

2013-02-26T20:16:00-05:00

There's been a tug of war between aesthetically pleasing and safe when it comes to American embassies around the world. Many embassies have been slammed as bunkers, bland cubes and lifeless compounds. Even the new Secretary of State John Kerry said just a few years ago, "We are building some of the ugliest embassies I've ever seen." But the choice between gardens and gates isn't just academic for diplomats — it can affect the way they work.

Previously: All the glamour of a corporate office block & American Embassy Buildings Increasingly Getting Ugly

Welcome to lockdown London

2012-03-13T23:41:00-04:00

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders – checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones – start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city.

Amidst news of the austere, lean venues and reviews of the architectural highlights constructed, Stephen Graham professor of cities and society at Newcastle University and author of Cities Under Siege, reminds us that London 2012 will see the UK's biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the second world war. The overall security costs are now projected to exceed £1bn and there is talk of deploying Ground Based Air Defence Systems.

H/T Demilit