What’s next, the Prada Chastity Belt?

Security chic is all the rage these days. Of course, where the Wall Street Journal does the staid and reasoned take, leave it to New York to make it all sexy. Or what they think passes for sexy. They asked several designers for their designs
for security barriers, which yielded a bonus Big Brother incident, when one of Winka Dubbeldam’s (who will continue to get good press, as she has the best name in architecture — take that Zaha!) interns got promptly detained for trying to snap a photo of a post office.

Her solution is a pretty standard gooey CAD-enabled pod that, whoo, lights up at night. If they really were photographing the post office SoHo, then this is bad idea contextually, since it would crowd the already narrow sidewalks. And, really, protecting the SoHo post office? You can’t even find it. What you would really be protecting is the Apple Store, which, given its role in outfitting legions of faux different iDrones, perhaps really is a mission-critical mandate.

There is also some inspired thinking, particularly from Daniel Kaplan of Fox & Folwe, who evinces what truly elegant design is about, pointing out that creating hollow sidewalks (strong enough to support pedestrians, but weak enough to collaspe under the load of a truck) would serve the exact same benefit as instrusive bollards. Michael van Valkenburgh takes a similar tack recommending trees. His use of Lincoln Center as a sample shows that it’s a ‘not for everywhere’ solution (given that most of the plaza is elevated, that is one of the few places where bollards wouldn’t detract).

Hopefully this is indicative of a continuing dialog to address this problem, as there is an immediate need for creative thinking, as the deployment of new designs continues apace.