Time For the Landscape Architects
And I am one, first off I have to own up to that. For thirty-five years I had my own private landscape architectural practice in the Chicago area.
Disclaimers aside, it’s past time for my profession to be invited in to ameliorate the “bunkerization” of Washington, as well as our embassies and corporate entities around the world. For one thing, there’s no need to be ugly to be safe and for the second and more important reason, we can ill afford to showcase democracy behind barbed-wire and concrete crash barriers. The problem lies in the frantic call for quick solutions, exacerbated by a mind-set that sees the need as temporary when it is not. The problem is long-term and quite probably permanent, a fact requiring re-thinking of the mindless road-barrier mindset that currently shapes our response to threat.
There are indeed better ways . . . even the old castle-moat was an aesthetically pleasant place to rain arrows upon an attacker. For the most part, security is terrain driven . . . ke…