ELSEWHERE: Form and Function: Disguising Security As Something Artful

"It looks like a kayak, or maybe a broken boat," says Boston lawyer Michael Litchman. "Honestly, I have no idea what it is."

No wonder Mr. Litchman is puzzled. He's looking at a new phenomenon in the American urban landscape: security disguised as art. The massive sculpture, carefully placed in front of the shallow main stairs, is intended to keep a terrorist from driving into the skyscraper's lobby with a bomb.

After the Oklahoma City bombing and the Sept. 11 attacks, worried building owners threw up rows of concrete highway barriers and mammoth planters around many office buildings. But since it's clear that security concerns aren't going away, corporate and public officials have begun to seek more aesthetically pleasing shields.

Decorative bollards, crash-proof benches and modern-day moats are blending into the American cityscape almost unnoticed. In the process, they have created a new subspecialty for architects, engineers and landscape designers -- all of whom now must be as well-versed in "antiram rating levels" and "standoff distances" as they are in elementary drafting.

In Seattle, a new 20-story federal courthouse scheduled to open this summer comes with a thicket of cleverly hidden protection. A perimeter of sweet gum trees, concrete benches and stainless-steel bollards forms the first line of defense. Should a suicide car bomber smash through those, he would face two options: Try to ford a "waterlily pond" that doubles as a security moat, or navigate through a grove of 80 trees carefully staggered to prevent a vehicle from getting a clear shot at the main entrance.

Then there's the sunken sculpture garden, designed both to please the eye and trap a vehicle in the soft grass. Even the building's sign is part of the security system: Twenty feet long and made of stone, it forms part of the western perimeter.

"If something does happen and they're able to break through all that, they have to figure out how to get up 18 feet of steps," says Rick Thomas, the building's project manager.

The intertwining of security and architecture is a throwback to antiquity. From medieval English castles to the Great Wall of China, structures throughout history have been built with defense in mind. Only in relatively recent times have cities and buildings been constructed on the assumption that they were safe from attack.

Many new building perimeters are designed to keep vehicles at what security types call a safe "standoff distance" -- preventing the nightmare scenario of a truck bomb penetrating into a modern tower's vulnerable core, where an explosion could trigger a catastrophic collapse.

Curt Betts, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blast expert, says a large vehicle bomb produces just one-eighth as much blast force on a building from 50 feet away as it does from 25 feet. Moving to 100 feet cuts that to just 2%.

But how best to keep vehicles away? Despite the popularity of the concrete highway barriers -- also known as Jersey barriers -- they are inadequate and unsightly, in Mr. Betts's opinion.

Enter the bollard. Commonly the strong posts on a pier or wharf for holding fast a ship's mooring line, the term bollard now also refers to the waist-high pillars that have become the barrier of choice around many buildings. Anchored as much as five feet into the ground, with a steel core, the toughest bollards meet U.S. government standards requiring them to halt a truck going 50 miles per hour.

Bollard makers now report a lot of demand for better-looking bollards. "Bollards can be beautiful," asserts the Web site of Delta Scientific Corp., a Valencia, Calif., manufacturer of security barriers. The company, which says business has grown three-fold since Sept. 11, has added a line of "designer bollards," including fluted ones that mimic ancient Greek columns, and others with a vaguely Victorian touch. Delta's bollard customers include the State Department and the National Archive building in Washington and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

A rival firm, SecureUSA Inc., in Atlanta, designed bollards shaped like giant golf balls for an 18-hole course at a military base. Then there's the gorilla bollard, a crouching fiberglass simian with four steel pillars hidden inside its arms and legs, installed at a theme park that the company declines to name. "To a kid, it just looks like a fun thing to climb on," says Bevan Clark, SecureUSA's president. "But it could stop a Ringling Brothers truck carrying a real gorilla going 30 miles an hour."

Bollards are the main perimeter security at the new Oklahoma City federal building, officially dedicated in May to replace the one bombed in 1995. Those by the front entrance are hidden inside much larger cylinders of perforated metal. At night, lights inside the devices make them glow like luminaria, the popular Mexican and Southwestern Christmas decoration of candle-lit paper bags weighted with sand.

"They really are fun," says the building's architect, Carol Ross Barney. "We used what could have been something oppressive and turned it into something a bit whimsical."

High-security landscaping also is in vogue. For the plaza of the federal courthouse in Minneapolis, landscape architect Martha Schwartz designed a series of chest-high earthen mounds. They should be almost impossible to drive over. But if a car bomber tries, he will get a nasty surprise: The plaza surface is designed to collapse into a void below if a vehicle drives onto it.

A dramatic new federal courthouse building in Miami, designed by the firm Arquitectonica, will use one of the simplest and most effective security barriers of all -- elevation. Built on a plateau, it will be bordered by a concrete retaining wall doubling as a bench. Surrounding the plateau will be a botanical garden planted with vehicle-deterring mature trees. Yet a third layer of deterrence will come in the form of an earth-sculpture on top of the plateau, made of 4- to 5-foot-high undulating mounds.

Not all security ideas work out. A moat-like water feature for a new San Francisco federal building was scrapped because of concerns that homeless people might bathe in it. Federal officials designing new protection for the Jefferson Memorial thought briefly about bollards in the shape of tiny Thomas Jeffersons but dismissed the idea as silly.

Nowhere has perimeter security been more a concern than in Washington, large parts of which have taken on the look of a military bunker. The National Capital Planning Commission, the federal government's urban-planning arm for the District of Columbia, was so upset about the ugly and often frightening fortifications it devised a sweeping "urban design and security plan" for the city.

One of the agency's first projects is already under way: Replacing the Jersey barriers now circling the Washington Monument with gentle, oval-shaped walls built of granite but with a rustic look.

A longer-range plan is to get rid of what the commission calls "bunker pots" -- outsize, concrete urns lining some of Washington's historic avenues. In their place would go "hardened street furniture," including special benches and reinforced decorative lampposts. Even the humble Washington trash can is supposed to morph into a security device.

"All it really is, is a bollard-shaped element with a trash can sleeve over it," says Elizabeth Miller, project manager for the urban security plan. "The average person wouldn't even know it's different from a trash can in Kansas City."