COLUMN ONE : Buildings That Say ‘Back Off’ : Defensive architecture proved its worth in the riots, as fortress-like structures fared well. But critics say the trend breeds ugliness and separates the haves and have-nots.

There was widespread looting and arson in the neighborhood around 3rd Street and Vermont Avenue, but the Shatto Recreation Center, a whale-shaped building only a block from the intersection, was untouched by the riots.

On Western Avenue in the center of Koreatown, near dozens of lots with charred metal beams where shops once stood, there was only minor damage to the three-story Koreatown Plaza.

More than a dozen homes were attacked in the Oakwood section of Venice, but an actor’s residence, constructed of corrugated iron, was not vandalized.

All three are examples of a defensive architecture that has emerged in the last decade in response to concerns about crime, graffiti and homelessness. Architects, who once relied solely on gates, walls and electronic systems to provide security, are instead beginning to make security an integral part of building design.

Long before the riots, building design was becoming more intimidating and fortress-like, with fewer open courtyards or picture windows and greater expanses of blank walls. Many commercial buildings have granite or tile at the base because it is easier to remove graffiti from hard, slick surfaces. In residential neighborhoods, architects are increasingly designing houses with featureless, anonymous facades, to discourage burglars. And in a number of communities, police have become an integral part of the planning process.

For many Southern California property owners, the rioting and the televised images of armed merchants barricaded in their stores served to reinforce feelings of vulnerability. Although no design can guarantee that a building will survive a major civil disturbance like the one that swept Los Angeles, or even keep out a determined criminal, developers are telling their clients that the right design can provide at least some protection. And they expect the recent unrest to accelerate the trend toward defensive design.

“After these riots . . . you’re going to see even more of design by fear,” said Bruce Sternberg, a member of the urban design committee for the American Assn. of Architects’ Los Angeles chapter. “Buildings will become more and more forbidding.”

Concerns about crime are influencing the architecture of Southern California in subtle and striking ways.

Santa Monica architect Brian Murphy, whose intimidating designs have earned him the title “guerrilla architect,” designed a corrugated iron house in Venice that features a metal door with studded steel bolts and a cyclone fence topped with razor wire. The address is spray-painted on the front, and the one window is made out of shattered glass--”to resemble the broken windows in the neighborhood,” Murphy said. He refers to the house, in a high-crime neighborhood, as “a compound.”

“This house says: ‘Don’t mess with me.’ And I’m sure that helped during the riots,” Murphy said. “I believe in looking at the reality of the situation and dealing with it straight on.”

After another Venice resident’s house was broken into five times, the owner called Murphy, who boarded up the windows and doors and spray painted the exterior with his own brand of graffiti. He then designed a showcase home behind the abandoned one, so it was invisible from the sidewalk.

“It would be irresponsible to just try to make my own architectural statement, oblivious to the security problems in the area,” Murphy said. “You do that and you might as well put a neon sign in front saying: ‘We’ve got VCRs and modern appliances. Come and get them.’ ”

Murphy and other architects say they are responding to their clients’ concerns. But some planning experts contend that this defensive architecture has a more ominous side. Larger social issues are being ignored, these critics say, and design is being used as a quick fix for more complex urban problems.

“Because public officials seemed to have little money or desire to come up with public solutions to these problems, developers pursued these Band-Aid solutions,” said Mark Baldassare, a professor of urban planning at UC Irvine. “This is a very L.A. approach, a highly individualistic way of protecting one’s wealth and property.”

Mike Davis, who teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, contends that because architects are “pitting the public and private realms against each other, we are creating a social apartheid.”

“If you’re a homeless or a black person walking around in this environment, how can you not feel that the hostility and exclusion is directed toward you,” said Davis, author of “City of Quartz,” a modern history of Los Angeles. “It reinforces stereotypes and helps legitimize the return of discrimination. I’m not claiming that the city isn’t dangerous, but let’s be honest about what we’re sacrificing.”

A number of downtown buildings constructed during the decade after the Watts riots, including the Bonaventure Hotel with its menacing cement base, were designed with security in mind. And the entire Bunker Hill redevelopment area was planned in the 1960s, Davis said, as an urban island, cut off from the poor and the minorities who populated the flatlands east of Hill Street.

During the 1980s, defensive architecture spread throughout Southern California as the crime rate rose, graffiti proliferated and the division between rich and poor widened, Baldassare said. Although the concept is becoming common throughout urban America, the change is more dramatic in Southern California, where buildings traditionally were designed to take advantage of the city’s mild weather and lush landscaping.

The region has long been known for its Spanish revival buildings with flower-filled courtyards, bungalows with large front porches made from wooden beams, commercial buildings with plazas in front, and showcase modern homes with great expanses of glass and sweeping front lawns.

But today, many courtyards are designed to be private and invisible from the street. Glass often is avoided for security reasons and wood rarely is used on exteriors because graffiti can be scratched into the surface. Increasingly, the view from the street in residential neighborhoods is high walls with thorny vines or anonymous-looking buildings.

Houses in Southern California traditionally were designed with “a sense of curb appeal,” said architect Frank Israel. People wanted architects to design houses that looked “rich and big because they were proud of them.”

“Now people want us to design houses that look obscure and are covered up with trees and bushes,” he said. “They’re afraid an impressive-looking place will invite robbery. So those kinds of houses and the big front lawns are not seen as an amenity any longer. People want to obscure their houses with big walls, large hedges and enclosed courtyards.”

Israel said he recently designed a house in Beverly Hills using inexpensive materials on the outside such as metal panels and concrete blocks. The residents, he said, wanted to “downplay the exterior and spend all the money on the house’s interior.”

“Buildings here used to be designed in a very open way--with a real relationship to the outdoors and lots of landscaping and open space,” said architect Herb Katz, a former Santa Monica planning commissioner. “Now we’re walling ourselves in.”

To provide sun-filled gathering spots for workers, architects are designing more office buildings with indoor atriums and skylights, instead of plazas in front. Even window design has changed.

One clothing store in West Hollywood has a series of long, extremely narrow windows, a design that has become a trendy trademark of the architect. But the windows were not designed for aesthetics, but to allow in sufficient light without being wide enough for burglars to crawl through. Measuring about one-foot wide, they are almost identical in size to the California prison system’s high-security cellblock windows.

Throughout Los Angeles there are other examples of structures, built in the late 1980s, that were shaped by security.

At the Koreatown Plaza on Western Avenue, there are large expanses of concrete and tile at street level--instead of a series of picture windows--and almost all the shops face the inside of the plaza. Los Angeles architect Ki Suh Park designed the structure so that the first thing a visitor sees after entering the plaza is an intimidating security office with guards studying eight closed-circuit televisions.

There was one break-in at the plaza during the riots and some looting at two of 75 businesses. But the damage was far less extensive than at neighboring buildings that were burned and razed.

Park is planning to further reduce the size of windows facing the street. And he is considering placing large planter boxes in front of the entrance, to prevent cars from crashing through locked doors--a method used by some rioters in Koreatown.

The Shatto Recreation Center in the Mid-Wilshire area, which escaped damage, achieves a balance between almost impregnable security and innovative design. The structure has no windows and a sharply sloped roof to prevent intruders from climbing on top. And it has remained free of graffiti because it was “built into the surface,” said Venice architect Steven Ehrlich. A calligrapher was contracted to design patterns and shapes on the building’s concrete and brick block surface so any new graffiti would be difficult to distinguish.

For some developers, even intimidating designs and high-tech security are not enough. A few recently requested that architects design police or sheriff’s substations as an integral part of their shopping centers. The developer of the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza, built in the late 1980s, went one step further: The mall has a full-fledged Los Angeles Police Department station where more than 200 officers are based.

The strong police presence, the six-foot metal fence surrounding the property and the overall security orientation saved the shopping center from the kind of damage inflicted on neighboring businesses, said Fred Bruning, a partner of the Haagen Co., which developed the property. As a result, Haagen has been flooded with calls from other developers during the past few weeks asking for advice on security design.

Mini-malls, however, were particularly vulnerable during the riots because of their easy access and large display windows. More than 30 were damaged or destroyed. Since the mid-1980s, the heyday of the mini-mall, many developers have pushed for more secure designs in commercial projects.

Some Los Angeles architects have been able to artfully address security concerns. Architect Frank Gehry designed two blue tile sculptures to run along the outdoor walls of a Hollywood library to prevent graffiti vandals from getting close enough to the walls to deface them.

The new Department of Water and Power administration building in downtown Los Angeles is set a few hundred feet away from the street for security; other DWP structures closer to the street have tiny opaque windows with concrete sills and the entire complex is encircled by a 12-foot wall. But architect Mehrdad Yazdani was able to address security concerns in such an innovative way--by designing the walls and buildings using unusual shapes, angles and colors--that the project won a city design award.

To many law enforcement agencies, defensive architecture has proven its value in crime prevention. During the past five years, crime has dropped by about 10% in the Central Division, which encompasses downtown, partly because of the department’s influence on the design of buildings and parking structures, said LAPD Capt. Jerry Conner.

In many communities, such as Santa Monica, La Verne, Long Beach and La Puente, law enforcement officials review projects and offer crime-prevention suggestions before the designs are approved by planning departments. Officers have made suggestions about lighting, landscaping, placement of balconies and the configuration of walkways in an attempt to reduce crime.

“People are going to look around after these riots and see that some buildings designed a certain way fared well, and others didn’t,” Conner said. “That’s going to have an impact. And developers are going to realize that in times of wholesale lawlessness, you can’t always count on the police to keep you safe. You can always benefit by a defensive design.”

But some architects fear that developers will increasingly emphasize security, with little regard for innovative design, and the architecture of the region will suffer.

“I think people passing by on the street will be seeing fewer windows, fewer gardens, fewer interiors . . . and more blank walls,” said architect Sternberg. “In many cases the key design consideration will be simply preventing unwanted people from getting into the building.”