Park Service Has a Bad Case of Tunnel Vision on Washington Monument Security
By Roger K. Lewis
Saturday, July 12, 2003; Page F05
If the National Park Service has its way, future visitors to the Washington Monument will enter its basement through a 500-foot tunnel built ostensibly to protect the beloved national symbol from terrorists.
Entering the Washington Monument through a tunnel is a costly, technically complex and aesthetically perverse idea. A tunnel not only may do little to enhance safety, but also may pose its own risks. Congress should turn down the Park Service's request for tens of millions of dollars to build the tunnel...
The site and form of the Washington Monument embody a simple but powerful design concept: a vertical, unadorned, abstract object placed on top of a small, relatively unadorned hill within a broad, unobstructed landscape. The obelisk is not organically part of the hill, nor does it emerge from within the hill. It resides on top of the hill, on the surface of a free and open landscape, and should be approached and entered by moving across that surface.
To bury the experience by bringing visitors to the monument's basement through a 500-foot-long tunnel, presumably for the sake of security, would be to seriously violate the monument's fundamental design integrity...
As for screening people for weapons, why not do it in a compact, state-of-the-art, shielded security vestibule just inside the existing east-facing plaza-level doorway? After all, the number of visitors permitted within the monument at any one time is small, limited by the capacity of the elevator and viewing platform.
The tunnel proposal is questionable for other reasons.
It poses geo-technical and structural risks because of unstable soils and a high water table. In the 19th century, it was poor soil that forced the obelisk off the north-south, monumental axis anchored by the White House and later the Jefferson Memorial. Construction of a tunnel could be problematic for both the tunnel and the monument's foundations...
Keeping vehicles at a distance and screening visitors for weapons are essential security needs. There are ways to satisfy them that would respect the monument, the Mall and its historic landscape. But spending tens of millions of dollars building a tunnel, one nearly as long as the monument is high, isn't one of them.
For the entire article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35836-2003Jul9.html
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