By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF, NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday march 4, 2007
New urban architecture applies its art to self-defense, in the face of fears of attack. Call it modern medievalism.
Not so long ago, architects were obsessed with the notion that globalism, the Internet and sophisticated new building technologies were opening the way for a more fluid, transparent landscape in which walls would simply begin to melt away.
Things didn’t turn out that way. After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. And the wars on terror, and fractious peaces, enforced it. The Green Zone in Baghdad, Jerusalem’s separation barrier, the concrete bollards that line corporate headquarters on Park Avenue — all are emblems of an unintended new mentality.
Four years after the American invasion of Iraq, this state of siege is beginning to look more and more like a permanent reality, exhibited in an architectural style we might refer to as 21st-century medievalism.
Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense, with aesthetically pleasing features like elegantly sculpted barriers around public plazas or decorative cladding for bulky protective concrete walls. This vision may seem closer in spirit to da Vinci’s drawings of angular fortifications or Michelangelo’s designs for organically shaped bastions than to a post-cold-war-era of high-tech surveillance.
The emblematic capital of this transformation is the Green Zone, the American encampment in Baghdad, where the 12-foot-high concrete slabs that surround Saddam Hussein’s former palaces have infused the city within a city with the ethos of the gated suburban enclaves of Southern California. It is a place with “the calm sterility of an American subdivision,” as described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” not a place that expresses American ideals of democracy and political transparency.
That mentality has become acceptable in relatively stable cities as well, including London, where a debate has now arisen over what do to with the concrete barricades that surround the United States Embassy in historic Grosvenor Square. Some suggest that they should be replaced by a permanent, more visually appealing barrier, as if better design could somehow negate the notion that we are surrendering to the inevitable. And in downtown Miami, federal marshals have suggested that the barricades originally included in the plans for a park designed by Maya Lin as part of a new courthouse complex might have to be reinforced, even as people begin to move into the building.
The most chilling example of the new medievalism is New York’s Freedom Tower, which was once touted as a symbol of enlightenment. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rests on a 20-story, windowless fortified concrete base decorated in prismatic glass panels in a grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia. And the brooding, obelisk-like form above is more of an expression of American hubris than of freedom.
But even the most thoughtful solutions, like the gracefully curved steel tubes that defend the plaza of Thom Mayne’s Caltrans District 7 headquarters building in Los Angeles or the faceted bronze bollards on Wall Street, suggest the fragile balance today’s architects are struggling to reach between assuring the freedom of movement that is vital to a functioning democracy and bolstering security.
To some, compromise may be preferable to surrounding our cities with barbed wire and sandbags. The notion that we can design our way out of these problems should give us pause, however. Our streets may be prettier, but the prettiness is camouflage for the budding reality of a society ruled by fear.
