Cityscape of fear

American architecture is still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Critics and architects say that security now trumps design, as barricades and mall-like plazas are sucking the soul out of urban life.

Editor's note: This article begins a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Politics, News, Architecture, Farhad Manjoo, 5 Years After

Aug. 22, 2006 | Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts set up a half dozen massive concrete freeway separators in a stately line across Josie Robertson Plaza, the complex's main outdoor entryway. The security barricades, unsightly white slabs known as Jersey barriers, were intended to protect the center's performance halls from a speeding truck bomb. Perhaps only the most unusually cultured of terrorists would want to hit Lincoln Center, which sits five miles north of ground zero on the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- but in the tense aftermath of the attacks, no precaution seemed too much. Lincoln Center groundskeepers thoughtfully topped the Jersey barriers with colorful potted plants, a rehabilitation technique along the lines of pinning a tiara on Medusa. Almost five years have passed since the attacks. The barriers remain in place.

To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you'll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. "French barriers," steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites -- including San Francisco's Transamerica Building -- like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they've mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation's capital felt so under siege.

It's not just the barriers, it's also the buildings. Since 9/11, risk consultants working for police departments, federal agencies and insurance companies have wrested control over many new construction plans. "There's a sense that security experts are acting as the associate architects on every project built today," says Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker. Consultants tend to encourage architectural bulk at the expense of grace. As a prime example, Goldberger points to the Freedom Tower, the skyscraper at the center of the proposed new Trade Center site. After the New York Police Department determined that an early design was vulnerable to truck bombs, the building's architect, David Childs, of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was forced to move the structure far back from the street, and to turn its lower 20 stories into a windowless reinforced concrete pedestal covered in glass. "It's a pretty grim piece of architecture," Goldberger says of the tower. "It doesn't advertise freedom to the world, it advertises fear."

Goldberger's assessment jibes with designers' larger worry over what we're losing in cities changed by 9/11. Security measures, they say, are undoing the many pleasures and functions of urban life. You don't need to have studied Jane Jacobs to understand that what's best about a city is often to be found on or just off sidewalks, in the dense, chaotic and free interplay between people and buildings. This may sound high-minded and theoretical. But by pushing people tightly together in small spaces, cities naturally increase the possibility of social intercourse. Merely strolling down a sidewalk in New York requires and instills more tolerance for other people than you're likely to need or learn during a year of life in an Atlanta exurb. Cultural theorist Marshall Berman, author of "On the Town," and other books on New York, adds that after 9/11, "the bonds of civil society were strenghthened in New York." He believes that now, in an era of low crime, New York feels more united than at any time in the recent past.

But others fear that security measures may be inhibiting urban connections. Setting buildings far back from the street, placing them atop concrete blast shields, crowding sidewalks with barricades, constantly screening people as they enter or exit buildings, electronically surveilling them at every waking moment -- these measures push us apart and foster our fears and suspicions. The effect is physical as well as psychic. Goldberger points out that you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that's nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm.

Many progressive architects argue that this is not how it has to be, and they've come up with thoughtful designs that accommodate legitimate security concerns without giving in to our worst nightmares. "Architecture has always elevated our society in times of distress, and always spoken to a sense of great social optimism," says Tim Christ, an architect at the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, which has won acclaim for the way it has balanced safety and beauty in its public projects, including the enormous new federal building in San Francisco. In New York, in particular, select firms are striving to incorporate the new security mandates into their designs in innovative ways. But conquering fear is difficult, and architects, whose creations will remain on the planet for decades to come, are divided on whether they can succeed. The 9/11 attacks put our cities on the front lines of a new war. Can we keep them from looking like battlefields?

Next page: "Everywhere is like the airport now. As a designer and citizen, I find it unacceptable"