21st Century Security and CPTED, 2nd Edition

17

3

Challenge of Architecture

in a Free Society*

Form Follows Function

That was a familiar tenet of twentieth century architecture, originally expressed by the Bauhaus

school of design and popularized in America by the architects Louis Sullivan and his student Frank

Lloyd Wright. Yet most architecture has focused on form, rather than function. It is as if the struc-

ture itself, harmony with the site, and integrity of the materials, has become the function. Less

emphasis has been placed on the activities taking place inside the building. As a whole, the profes-

sion continues to be dominated by the view that architecture is a matter of aesthetics (Figure 3.1),

and that form only follows form (Wikipedia, November 2006):

The intrinsic signicance of our craft lies in the philosophical fact that we deal in nothing. We create

emptiness through which certain physical bodies are to move—we shall designate these physical bodies for

convenience as humans. By emptiness I mean what is commonly known as rooms. Thus, it is only the crass

layman who thinks that we put up stonewalls. We do nothing of the kind, we put up emptiness (Rand, 1943).

Architecture, by denition, is built for people. Architecture is the enclosure in which people live

their lives. The behavior of people within the architecture demonstrates the dynamically moving

social fabric of the human race (Heimsath, 1999). Any building must meet specic functional

criteria, and from the function the design evolves. A building must permit efcient job performance,

meet the needs of the user, and protect the user from safety hazards and criminal acts that affect the

production of goods and service:

An architect uses steel, glass, and concrete, produced by others, but the materials remain just so much

steel, glass, and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is individual product and his

individual property (Rand, 1943).

Architects worry about the fortress mentality of security professionals, whereas security profes-

sionals are concerned about the architects’ failure to include security elements into the design of

*

Portions of the text in this chapter consist of articles and other publications previously written by the author including

possible portions found in the following Wiley publications: Architectural Graphics Standards, 10th Edn., Ramsey/Hoke,

The American Institute of Architects, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN: 0471348163, 2000; Security Planning and Design:

AGuide for Architects and Building Design Professionals. Demkin, The American Institute of Architects, John Wiley &

Sons, ISBN: 0471271567, 2004. We offer special thanks to the American Institute of Architects and John Wiley & Sons for

permission to reproduce common content in this work.

CONTENTS

Three Keys in Building Design ........................................................................................................19

Architectural Program ......................................................................................................................23

CPTED Emerges on the Scene.........................................................................................................25

References ........................................................................................................................................27

18 21st Century Security and CPTED

the building from the ground up. The conict is not over whether to include security equipment

inthe building design but, rather, the conict lies between a building’s openness, on the one hand,

andcontrol of access to it, on the other.

It is always bad news when it becomes necessary to secure a building that was not originally

planned to be secure. It is also very expensive. Architects have to sacrice much more of a build-

ing’s openness in retrotting for security than they would if the facility had been designed for

security from the outset. Making matters worse, protection, personnel, and operating expenses are

greater than they need to be because of a lack of forethought during the design of the facility. This

condition is particularly evident in many of today’s buildings (Figure 3.2), where modern design and

materials can result in facilities that are especially vulnerable.

Blair Kamin (2010: p. 31) wrote:

we cannot design a world that makes us a 100% safe. Recognizing this, architects and clients for the

new terminal at O’Hare airport in Chicago have accepted a certain level of risk and carefully layered

their response into a remarkably open design in which defensive measures are skillfully integrated into

the architecture rather than grotesquely applied.

FIGURE 3.1 Form or function in modern architecture? (From Shutterstock.com.)

FIGURE 3.2 Modernism and postmodernism generations of architecture show us the form of our built envi-

ronment. (From Shutterstock.com.)