The criteria with which today’s urban space is designed is increasingly determined by projections of anxiety and escalation. The architecture of everyday functional urban space is designed to provide pleasant daytime sojourn for guests yet unpleasant nighttime surveillance for loiterers, to facilitate for a ceremony but not for a demonstration, to accommodate the wealthy but not the poor. With reference to such criteria, Hertzsch + Page are launching a new product range which might ease (or heighten) anxieties in urban space.
These products are being marketed under the name of SECUROPRODS.© .
SECUROPRODS.© have been specifically designed for entrance situations in publically accessible, private buildings, these being most dominant in today’s urban experience. SECUROPRODS.© offer the most anxious of property owners the opportunity to rapidly transform, for example, their revolving door entrance into a revolving security turnstile, their reception desk into a private body-search booth or their potted plant displays into access barriers, according to potential situations on their property. Their kit-form design facilitates the necessary mobility for their speedy transfer to 'problem' points in or around a property.
Hertzsch + Page will be demonstrating SECUROPRODS.© to the public in situ, in spaces where they are most likely to be of use, where anxieties are most intense. The public nature of such an undertaking and the somewhat disturbing presence (despite their pastel colours) that the SECUROPRODS.© will have ‘on the streets’ is conceived to provoke debate about the reprecussions of developments in security measures at home, work and play. SECUROPRODS.© forewarn of an eventual locking up of public space and of the remapping of cities according to security zone stategies.
