In an age where monuments and prominent buildings are viewed as perpetually subject to attack, where fortification must co-exist with dynamic urban sites, and where the landscape designer is asked once again to artfully confound, the ha-ha has become relevant again. Although we are accustomed to seeing systems of control as metaphysical rather than physical structures, the fortification of American cities since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing reminds us that control, under threat, must manifest itself. The construction of U.S. embassies in the new age of terror is illustrative. Circa 2003, as Berlin emerged from a decade of reconstruction following reunification, the rebuilt Pariser Platz was lined with branch offices of major governments and banks. But the site of the U.S. embassy, vacant since the Second World War, lay fallow in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, mired in security negotiations. Until 2008, the embassy operated out of temporary quarters off Unter den Linden, surrounded by an astonishing array of concrete bollards, guard booths, lift-arm gates, Jersey barriers and fencing. Amid the formal neoclassical order of central Berlin, the embassy conveyed a shocking image of power under siege.
The new embassy finally opened in May 2008. With its steel bollards, which extend across and block the street in front, it cuts a bulkier profile than its glassy-walled neighbor, the Gehry-designed DZ Bank headquarters. Design architect John Ruble was quoted by Bloomberg as saying "Pariser Platz has been completely redesigned to address the security issue in a way that’s not visible. It looks like a normal part of the city." Here design is called into service to mediate between enclosure and openness just as the ha-ha once softened the boundaries of the garden. The picturesque garden was developed in a century when the English countryside was undergoing a massive transformation. The Commons system of shared land-use succumbed to enclosure, causing radical economic and social upheavals. England, according to David Watkin, is "a country which has specialised in preserving the picturesque facades of ancient institutions whilst making fundamental changes to the reality behind them." The ha-ha disguises changes in relations between Lord and tenant. When viewed from the manor house, whose garden it encircles, it acts as a symbolic mediation.
Today, the image of the city as a system of circulation is compromised by the image of the city as fortress. Landscape architects are called upon to aestheticize the rude barriers surrounding potential targets, as in the NoGo designed by Rogers Marvel for the front of the New York Stock Exchange: faceted bronze over steel bollards, publicized with photographs of children climbing on them. More sophisticated design work secures the monumental government core in Washington. For half a decade, an uneven ring of Jersey barriers prominently encircled the Washington Monument, until a proposal by Olin Partnership was realized. Now, a low ha-ha, designed in the form of a continuous bench, surrounds the monument to protect it from vehicular assault.
The project of naturalizing security features is highly developed in the new rash of architecturally ambitious Federal Courthouses erected in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Minneapolis under the General Services Administration Design Excellence program. Although their plazas aim for a more pastoral environment, the buildings resemble the sterile tower-in-plaza style of
late 20th century American urbanism. The landscapes are ingenious in design: Martha Schwartz’s system of tear-shaped mounds, inspired by glacial drumlins, gives a Teletubbies landscape quality to the front of the new courthouse in Minneapolis, while preventing vehicles from reaching the building’s walls. The plaza itself is a thin sheet over an excavated pit, designed to carry visitors on foot and to collapse under heavier loads (such as a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer). This solution, known as the Tiger Trap, is invisible until you’re in it: Ha! Ha!
Written by Eric Fredericksen
