THE ART OF DEFENSE: Design strikes defensive posture

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.