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Barricades Cover Their Muscle
With Warmth, Style
Ugly concrete barricades are out.
Firms now want alternatives, such as planters.
By RENEE TAWATIMES STAFF WRITER
November 8 2001
The "Terra Cotta" color and texture line is warm, offering proprietary shades that have the "look and feel" of sun-baked clay. Among the design options are tall "Florence-style" planters--round, elegant with a raised ridge, and a sturdy 5,300 pounds.
Filled with ficus trees or flowers, a row of the planters has the same aim as the temporary concrete barriers that pop up in front of government buildings after a terrorist attack against the U.S.: to deflect the aim of an explosives-filled truck.
In a backlash against the ugly barriers--not to mention their unsettling symbolism--firms that offer planter barricades and other options have faced a growing demand for their services since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The camouflaged barricades can be just as effective as freeway barriers, security firms assert. Lately, corporate executives, government officials and even homeowners have been asking about the less-jarring barriers, in another sign of what Vice President Dick Cheney calls "the new normalcy" in America, a permanent state of heightened security. For instance, executives at the 72-story Library Tower in downtown Los Angeles, the tallest building west of the Mississippi, and the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago, the country's tallest building, are consulting with architects to come up with permanent barriers that don't clash with their skyscrapers. (After Sept. 11, both towers erected temporary concrete barriers; Sears Tower's barriers are painted red, white and blue, with stars.)
In the next several weeks, Library Tower managers will replace the rented concrete barriers with an "elegant" alternative, said Peggy Moretti, vice president of Maguire Partners, which developed and owns the building. "It will be in the same language, if you will, of the building. The form will be important."
Stonewear, a firm in Carson City, Nev., offers 10,000 design options for its security barricades, including the Terra Cotta line. The company has been receiving 80 to 100 inquires a day about alternatives to raw concrete barricades since the attacks. "No. 1, they don't want to appear to have this siege mentality," said Ben VandenBossche, president of Stonewear. "No. 2, it doesn't do much for the aesthetics of the area." Stonewear recently designed planter barricades for the headquarters of Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich., and a Phillips Petroleum Co. plant in Old Ocean, Texas.
The plain barriers used on highways are made of steel-reinforced concrete and turned out in mass quantities. At about $25 a foot, the segments (most are 12 to 20 feet long) are cheap and easy to move and install, not to mention sturdy enough to deflect the impact of a car.
The concrete barriers first were erected at government buildings, including the White House, in 1983, after a truck loaded with explosives crashed into a U.S. Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241.
In 1995, after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the barriers became familiar sights in the U.S. The reappearance of the concrete blocks in 1998, after the terrorist attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, prompted a call for alternatives. Critics, for instance, have lashed out at the 3-foot-high barricades that were erected at the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument after the embassy bombings and never removed. (The National Park Service is considering permanent alternatives such as decorative steel posts.) "Shameful," wrote Benjamin Forgey, the Washington Post's architecture critic, in August. "This is the symbolic heart of the democracy ... somehow we have managed to decorate it with this tawdry concrete necklace."
Since Sept. 11, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has met with several federal agencies that are seeking alternatives to concrete barricades, said commission Secretary Charles Atherton. For instance, in Washington, D.C., the commission is working with Federal Reserve officials on ways to add barricades while preserving their building's 1930s feel and the classical revival columns, pediments and molding, Atherton said. But throughout the capital, the desire is to avoid a "fortress America" feel or the Washington Monument's ring of concrete.
"There are so many ways of securing buildings other than circling the wagon," Atherton said. "There are planters and bollards [posts] and fountains and all sorts of devices that can be deceptive. Underneath all those flowers, there can be 14 inches of steel."
As security structures, massive planters can be comparable to highway barriers, said Dean L. Sicking, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. A row of connecting highway barriers is designed to stop a truck such as a U-Haul at 45 mph; security planters or posts can do the same, if they have enough mass and are spaced about 3 feet apart, narrower than the width of a truck frame. But barriers can be disconnected, or "if you have enough explosives, and park the truck next to the building, you can still take the building down," said Sicking, a highway safety research expert.
Barrier makers, on the other hand, say their structures are as strong as possible. Stonewear's planters are made of glass-fiber reinforced concrete and buttressed with a hidden steel rebar cage. A planter barricade is designed to divert trucks into the air, rather than simply stopping mass with mass, VandenBossche said.
Designer barricades are more expensive than the plain freeway ones. "It's not just a chunk of concrete," said Todd Ebbert, vice president of San Diego Precast Concrete Inc. Prices vary, depending on size and design. But a single round security planter that is 60 inches in diameter and 48 inches tall, weighing 7,200 pounds, is $800, or more for "architectural accents," Ebbert said. One building could require up to several hundred planters. (By comparison, a 20-foot stretch of a plain concrete barrier is $400 to $500.)
In Midland, Va., Smith-Midland Corp. officials began developing a new line of security planters after reading the architecture critic's piece in the Washington Post on the unsightly barriers at the Washington Monument. The new planters are made of precast concrete but look like a hand-cut stone wall, said company Vice President Ashley Smith.
Most of SecureUSA Inc.'s business comes from government, said chief executive Michael "Mick" Keough in Cumming, Ga. Lately, though, a few homeowners have called, asking for information about the company's decorative steel bollards, which look like old-fashioned hitching posts or mansion-style pillars. (A set of posts across a typical driveway costs $60,000 to $70,000.)
The decorative posts also are designed for "lower threat" use in front of university buildings or rental car agencies, though the company has not yet taken such orders. Keough doesn't expect to be flooded with requests, but the company is prepared for any type of client. "We are just incredibly open in this country, compared to everyone else in the free world.... Before Sept. 11, most people didn't think that we would ever be touched. Now we're being shown that absolutely we are vulnerable. We are so lucky here. We don't want to infringe on anyone's civil liberties of any sort. Even if someone has to walk down the sidewalk in a different way [to avoid barriers], it's, 'Excuse me ?"'