Jonathan Morrison
Safe houses: architects who fight terror
From stadiums to parliaments, the next generation of public buildings will combine sleek design with top-notch security
When Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed attempted to drive their dark green Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane gas canisters into the front of Glasgow Airport in 2007, they discovered the hard way just what the current generation of security-sensitive architecture is capable of. Travelling at about 30mph, their two-tonne vehicle was no match for the bollard in front of the main terminal building and was reduced to a flaming wreck.
In the years since, the terrorist threat to Britain and its allies has increased and the government rates the danger as “severe”. While fanatics of many persuasions continue to innovate, several of the recent terror attacks by Isis in France have nonetheless featured vehicles as weapons, such as an attempt to blow up a gas factory on June 26, 2015, in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, near Lyon and the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice last month that left 85 dead.
So perhaps it is no surprise that bollards have become the first line of defence for western society. They form dotted lines up shopping arcades, around transport hubs and important buildings deemed at risk, such as the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Portland Place, central London, or the new Francis Crick Institute in northwest London, where research into viruses such as avian flu will be conducted.
Ever since the IRA started its bombing campaign in earnest, following the organisation’s accidental invention of the ammonium nitrate-fuel oil car bomb in 1972, British scientists and engineers have been involved in a sort of Red Queen’s race against the killers, devising and testing ever more sophisticated barriers and countermeasures, and are acknowledged as the world leaders in this field.
For contemporary architects though, the main disadvantage of the bollard is the requirement for extensive substructures. Like land-dwelling icebergs, they have steel spikes sunk deep into the ground and their exposed tips are more than able to withstand a large lorry travelling at speed: a head-on impact from a seven-tonne lorry driven at 50mph would barely rattle them. At St Pancras station, however, the new underground ticket hall was built so close to the surface that the designers had to devise a steel foundation system to provide sufficient support for the bollards above.
In addition, the requirement is to make the barriers unobtrusive: no one wants to live behind barbed wire and tank traps. Belfast city centre was turned into a fortress during the Troubles, with high concrete walls and impenetrable gates, checkpoints and soldiers, but the increase in physical security all but destroyed it as a social and commercial hub. As Ruth Reed, a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, puts it, “It is important that our built environment continues to reflect that we are an open and inclusive society and that our buildings do not convey that we are driven by security measures.”
Perhaps nowhere is this dichotomy more obvious than around Westminster, where the heavy black blocks surrounding the Houses of Parliament have been decried by visitors as an eyesore. If not downright intimidating, they certainly offer few advantages over the equally sturdy but more elegant balustrades that line Whitehall. The Emirates Stadium in Holloway, north London, is considered an exemplar of what can be achieved subtly: the cannon outside reference the club’s history and Gunners nickname, but will stop a lorry, as will the big concrete letters spelling out “Arsenal”.
HOK, the architectural firm behind the Emirates, is working on a 10,000-seat stadium for the FC Barcelona sports club that is designed to mix the secure and the enjoyable. “The challenge is to create a safe environment that does not impinge on people having a good time,” says John Rhodes, the director of HOK’s Sport + Recreation + Entertainment practice. “From day one, you have to plan your strategy for security, and preferably develop a flexible one that can adapt to different levels of threat without making people think they are living in a prison camp.
“And yet, nowadays, venues really have to be as robust as airports. In Barcelona, for example, we’re maximising the use of public space to create a buffer zone, but at least in the Mediterranean climate people will enjoy using it.”
At the other end of the scale is the new US embassy in Nine Elms, London, which features the first purpose-built moat in Britain for many years, along with raised terraces and trenches. Few buildings have to balance security concerns with aesthetics to the extent that an embassy does, but most agree that the structure, which should be completed later this year, has more in common with William the Conqueror’s White Tower downriver than previous, more open missions.
While most sympathise with the desire to avoid a second bombing along the lines of the one at the US embassy in Beirut in 1983, critics feel that the $1 billion design, by the architecture firm KieranTimberlake, places too much emphasis on physical security and has abandoned the Cold War tradition of promoting the American way through culture. Instead it has become the physical embodiment of “Fortress America”. Nicolai Ouroussoff, of The New York Times, in a review titled “A new fort, er, embassy, for London”, wrote: “It’s hard to think of a project that more perfectly reflects the country’s current struggle to maintain a welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack.”
However, it’s not just the areas around buildings that have been reshaped and colonised by concrete planters, blast-resistant street furniture and an infinite array of bollards. Terrorism has been the catalyst for a subtle reshaping of our street plans too. The new road system behind the redeveloped King’s Cross station is designed to prevent a lorry getting up to speed, while two thirds of the routes into the City have been closed to traffic (the rest are under the scrutiny of the world’s most advanced CCTV system, believed to utilise facial recognition software in addition to checking each vehicle’s numberplate).
In Bristol, during the construction of the Cabot Circus shopping centre the streets were realigned to direct traffic away from the centre’s borders. Even the humble speedbump has a role to play in deterring an attack requiring momentum; perhaps the term “sleeping policeman” is more apt than most imagine.
So much for vehicles, but what about other bombs, of the sort that used to be left lying around by the IRA? Will Wilkinson, from QCIC, the leading security engineering consultancy, has good news. “You can’t ever make something completely blast-proof,” he says, “but we’ve been designing against explosions for more than 30 years and are in a much better position than most nations because of the experience we’ve had with the IRA. A lot of work is done to consider terror in design.”
He’s quick to point out that whereas 90 per cent of injuries after a bomb used to result from flying glass, modern buildings are far more resilient and typically feature PVB laminated glass leaf, which reacts a lot like a car windscreen. Like the rest of the new crop of anti-terrorist measures — including fibre-based bollards that require little in the way of substructure — the glass is thoroughly tested at RAF Spadeadam in Cumbria. Curved panes of glass have also shown promise, as has the adoption of sparsely utilised “crumple zones” in key structures. At the end of the day, though, “every metre counts” and the best strategy is to keep the bomb as far away as possible.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo in January last year, and the roaming gunmen that caused havoc in Paris in November, have led to a focus on what has been termed MFTA: marauding terrorist firearms attacks. “We can see how quickly the threat changes, but we have been thinking about this for a while,” Wilkinson says. “We can’t make all glass bulletproof, but most buildings can be locked down quickly and, here in the UK at least, where the police will react quickly, the terrorists won’t waste their time trying to force their way through lots of fastened doors.” Some offices are being built with safe havens or especially hardened areas for senior executives to seek refuge in. And you thought the disparities in pay were bad enough.Of course, there is no way to predict exactly what will happen: the threat is always mutating. Rhodes believes that technology will play an ambiguous part: “It can be both good and bad,” he says. “New software is allowing us to manage crowds in real time and scanners are getting cheaper, but then we might start to see a new threat from drones emerging. If people are flying flags into stadiums tethered by drones [as happened during a Euro 2016 qualifier between Serbia and Albania], it won’t be long before one of them tries to fly in a bomb. You just don’t know what tomorrow’s threat will be.” At least some very clever people are thinking about it carefully. That in itself is a comfort.
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