Designed for Threat: Surveillance, Mass Shootings, and Pre-emptive Design in School Architecture

Contemporary political discourse around security, immigration, and terrorist threat manifests in two trends in educational architectural: the fortress school and surveilled flow. The fortress grows out of the urban-renewal movement of the post-World War II era, particularly on American university campuses. This architecture pre-empts threat by clamping down and fortifying its peripheral walls while controlling, surveilling, and limiting the number of entrances. Lockdown procedures, encouraging surveillance among citizens, metal detectors, increased police presences, and data-mining are all tactics at the fortress’ disposal. The alternative, much newer approach pre-empts threat by surveilling flow; that is, inviting people inside the structure and encouraging traffic while relying on more remote and less obvious tactics for detecting undesirables, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), data-mining, and, like the fortress model, encouraging peer surveillance. Surveilled flow maintains the gesture of openness; however, this is mainly aesthetic, as other methods of intrusive policing take place at less-visible levels. At the heart of both of these articulations of pre-emptive threat culture is the digital-age anxiety about the alignment and possible misalignment between visual and information-based citizen profiles: Does the student or visitor appear to be a threat? Does his or her online behavior indicate potential threat? The profusion of information in the digital age meets this more primal desire to commensurate the appearance of risk with other forms of information-based evidence of threat. Digital-era concerns about how to interpret a wealth of information at various institutional and cultural levels pervade the riskscape in the developed world, and educational architecture is but one manifestation.