‘A Hardware Kind of Response’ to Tragedy?

Should architects and planners be designing additional security features into campus buildings? In the aftermath of the killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, that question has almost certainly been asked on every college campus in North America. An associate principal in the Chicago office of the architecture firm Perkins + Will, Kenneth Rohlfing, told a Northwestern University journalism student that “more and more campuses are developing responses, usually a hardware kind of response.”

But can buildings strike a balance between protecting their occupants from unforeseen calamities and encouraging the unanticipated discussions—between students and professors, or among scholars in different disciplines—that are the lifeblood of academe? In recent years, more and more campus buildings have been configured to make possible chance encounters in atriums, on stairways, and in casual social spaces designed into hallways. Would attempting to make such buildings more secure produce the kind of awkward spaces now seen in airports, where once-open concourses have become mazes of security walls? Will the level of security that now protects residence halls be extended across campuses, so that every doorway denies entrance to those without specific business on the other side of it? It’s not a pleasant thought. But what are the alternatives? —Lawrence Biemiller