Safe & Secure

“The history of architecture is the history of the world,” Englishman Augustus Pugin observed a century and a half ago.

Pugin’s best-known design, the Houses of Parliament, tells us something about authority in the British Empire, just as Gothic cathedrals reflect the Catholic Church’s role in 11th century Western Europe.

China’s 1,500-mile-long Great Wall - the only human structure visible from the moon - testifies to the Ming dynasty’s power, and its paranoia.

Does contemporary architecture suggest something about our priorities and values? About our fears?

Will historians draw connections between today’s rising inequity in wages and the growing popularity of gated communities? Will they infer a link between late-20th century office designs and the World Trade Center bombing?

Most architectural clients aren’t yet preoccupied with security issues. But demand for greater personal safety is growing, and it’s affecting the design of our schools, libraries, courthouses and neighborhoods.

Architects are getting better at blending security features into appealing facades and efficient floor plans, but the cost still shows up in the budget. And guess who pays?

Security expert Gerald Winkler led the Integrus Architecture team that designed the just-completed U.S. Embassy in Bogota. Overall cost for the 20-acre compound was roughly $70 million, “but if we were to build the same thing in Spokane,” Winkler says, “I doubt it would cost $20 million.”

Some of the added expense can be blamed on the difficult site - an ancient lake bed. The ground was “preloaded” to minimize settling, and the embassy itself built on a 7-foot-thick concrete raft.

A bigger factor, though, was shipping. Most of the building materials were sent from the U.S. to Colombia. “It’s a fact of life,” explains Winkler, “that it’s very expensive to do this kind of construction overseas and still meet all the security requirements - and there’s good reason for those requirements.” (Beirut’s truck bombing and Moscow’s electronic bug infestation come to mind.)

Today, Bogota is one of the world’s most dangerous cities. “You have the Marxists out there making their political statement by killing people,” Winkler says, “and then you have what they call the narco-terrorists - the drug cartel folks. Even domestic violence is quite high.”

The embassy’s 450 employees travel to and from work in bulletproof vans escorted by well-armed guards. Access to the embassy compound is restricted to U.S. government vehicles. The grounds are patrolled by 14 Marines and an army of private police.

Winkler’s task was to anticipate every reasonable threat to the embassy and its occupants - including blasts, ballistics and forced entry - and incorporate appropriate defenses. But he also had to design structures that would fit Bogota’s traditional Spanish ambience and project a friendly image to our Colombian hosts.

A blast consultant advised Integrus about setbacks, wall thicknesses and related security specifications. Embassy windows, for instance, are a 1-1/8-inch-thick sandwich of glass and polycarbonate.

And they’re small. Instead of a typical glass wall in the lobby to take advantage of natural light, Winkler used a quilt-like pattern of 49 smaller windows.

Most visitors to the embassy pass through security gates on foot and proceed to the visa courtyard, where they wait their turn beneath a canvastopped concrete trellis. Winkler designed the trellis to protect pedestrians from the elements, but made it heavy enough that it won’t become a projectile in the event of a blast.

Likewise, a large chunk of granite directly outside the front door serves a dual purpose: It creates aesthetic interest, and also shields the entryway.

The main building is arranged in a horseshoe shape to provide employees with a pleasant courtyard and an unobstructed view toward the Andes Mountains. Just beyond the courtyard wall is a large, Manito Park-like artificial pond, which Winkler describes as “a little bit of subterfuge.”

“The pond prevents anyone from building there in the future,” he says. “Once a facility is turned over to the State Department, there’s a tendency to throw up a tin shed anywhere that’s convenient when someone needs another warehouse. We didn’t want that. We carefully master-planned the whole site for future expansion, and we want them to stick with the plan.”

The bunker-strength building is clad in stucco and sandstone to soften its exterior, and the grounds are being planted according to a design by Tom Sherry of Spokane’s Robert Perron Landscape Architects. Recreational facilities include basketball and tennis courts, and a -mile perimeter patrol path that doubles as a jogging trail.

Winkler’s interest in high-security projects began 20 years ago, when he worked on a jail for Ventura County. Since then, he and Integrus have built a reputation in the security field, winning commissions for criminal justice, court and law enforcement projects.

Winkler recently returned from Washington, D.C., where he helped lead an American Institute of Architects workshop on “Designing Building Security.”

“There are probably only a dozen architectural firms in the country with the same level of expertise we have regarding secure design,” Winkler says. “But there used to be only three or four, so the emphasis is changing.”

Recent clients have included a Honolulu hospital that sought advice on ways to prevent people from stealing babies from its nursery. Plans for a regional police facility in Hawaii were modified after last April’s Oklahoma City bombing; a proposed basement loading dock was relocated away from the main building.

“Things are changing in Spokane, and sometimes it seems like we’re losing control,” says Winkler. “But our problems are nothing compared to a lot of the world. Whenever I travel to a place like Colombia - or even Los Angeles, for that matter - I always really appreciate coming back to Spokane.”

Barbara Smith has watched with dismay as national trends have forced changes at downtown Spokane’s U.S. Courthouse, which she manages for the General Services Administration.

When Smith arrived eight years ago, the building was secured at night with conventional locks. Soon afterward, a card-key system was installed to better control after-hours access.

About four years ago, threats to federal judges elsewhere caused court security officers to set up a gate at the front door, complete with X-ray machine and magnetometer.

Following last spring’s Oklahoma City bombing, the building’s pedestrian plaza was cordoned off with concrete traffic barricades - later replaced by $8,000 worth of planters - to prevent vehicles from approaching the building.

But that didn’t stop pranksters from paralyzing downtown traffic two weeks ago by placing fake sticks of dynamite next to the building during the night.

“Employees are very much more concerned about their safety,” Smith says, “particularly after that recent incident.”

The courthouse plaza was scheduled for a security upgrade even before Oklahoma City. Ritch Fenrich of ALSC Architects designed a $750,000 renovation that uses trees and structural modifications to enhance the plaza’s ambiance while addressing security issues and solving the problem of water leaking through the slab surface into the basement garage.

If the project is funded, it will include moving the front entrance out beyond the main structure to prevent someone from carrying a bomb inside the building and causing its collapse.

A recent nationwide survey by the GSA rated the relative risk to federal buildings. Because Spokane’s U.S. Courthouse is occupied by various law enforcement agencies, as well as the Internal Revenue Service and federal courtrooms, it earned a 4 - just one notch below the highest risk level.

Architect Fenrich says the biggest challenge with upgrading security at the federal building is that its original designers intended just the opposite.

“Since it’s a federal building,” he says, “they designed it to open its arms to the public and not be a fortress. The plaza was meant to enhance the free flow of pedestrians.

“Unfortunately, that also allowed the free flow of vehicles, if someone were of that inclination.”

GSA’s Smith says she never imagined she’d become a target when she hired on 30 years ago, “and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

“We all want the innocence we had before Oklahoma City, but we’re not headed in that direction.”

Northwest Architectural Co. enjoys the distinction of having designed an unusually secure structure: a satellite tracking station built to withstand a nuclear blast.

It’s no coincidence that the station also is one of the region’s most expensive buildings. At $500 a square foot, it cost the government roughly five times the going rate for commercial construction.

But Uncle Sam isn’t the only NAC client interested in security.

Spokane’s new downtown library has a so-called “security bubble” on its second and third floors.

“All the doors are alarmed,” explains architect Russ Smith, “and all employees carry magnetic ID cards that control which areas they have access to.”

The system’s main purpose is to protect the library’s collection, “but it also provides security for the staff,” says Smith. “A library is a strange place with a lot of strange people hanging around.”

Fellow NAC architect Ben Nielsen points out that electronics help designers enhance security without compromising aesthetics.

“In the Spokane library, you don’t even know it’s there,” Nielsen said.

And electronics can be designed to give clients the flexibility to adjust to changing security needs, says NAC’s Steve McNutt.

“Schools tend to be looser about controlling access than somewhere like the Seafirst Credit Card Center,” architect McNutt says. “But we do routinely install after-hour intrusion alarms in schools, and we organize the planning to encourage people to enter through a main door, which allows administrators to monitor people coming and going.

“That also gives administrators the option of being as tight or loose as they see fit. Theoretically, they could close all the doors except the main entry and institute very tight control,” says McNutt, “but right now the threat isn’t significant enough for that.

“We’ve tried to make access convenient because 99 percent of the school users want it that way,” says McNutt. “Unfortunately, the other 1 percent could eventually force us to pour as much money into (security improvements) as we already spend on the rest of the building.”

“Ultimately,” says Nielsen, “we’ll have to decide how much we’re willing to cave in to errant behavior. I don’t see us going to the modern equivalent of the moat and castle, because I don’t think we want to live that way.

“The bottom line is that buildings are meant to be used and enjoyed by people,” Nielsen says, “and if we can’t get in them, what’s the point?”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 color photos