“Don’t be afraid – be ready,” says the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Fear is the price we pay for our constantly growing security needs,” says Stephan Trueby, architect and author. Trueby has published a book with contributions from Noam Chomsky, Brian Massumi, and others about “5 Codes - Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror.”
Based on the premise that “no culture theory can afford to ignore the considerations of military strategy,” Trueby correlates the five-codes warning system of the U.S. government with Le Corbusier’s “5 stages” and elaborates on the entanglements between city, space, risk, and paranoia, as urbanism and architecture become more and more painfully marked by a culture of fear in times of global terrorism. From the primitive hut of the Unabomber to corridors and panic rooms, 5 Codes examines how fear has always been a driving force in the history of architecture and concludes that “pervasive stressors create pervasive protected spaces.” When - in times of “war against terror”– war is waged pervasively, “only movement is secure, movement without vanishing point.” When architecture is charged with designing space for a "permanent state of emergency,” then the result is architecture whose main purpose is to leave architecture. Hence Architecture designs “escape routes out of architecture into the exit spaces of an un-pacified area in which inside and outside no longer apply as categories.”
The solution the book offers is an escape, too: Instead of a new design for architecture, Trueby recommends “gadgetecture,” which he understands as a set of devices that warrant personal safety in the tradition of James Bond: “Everyone who’s constantly on the run needs gadgets.”
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