Usually the concept of public safety involves the idea of protection using barricades, surveillance circuits linked to unseen, hidden and guarded places where the police force works to promote the citizens’ safety.

The fact that most police stations are built with features that instead of conveying a sense of security to the citizen arouse a feeling of anxiety, thus inducing fear, is generally not considered problematic.
The majority of police stations are hermetically closed, unable to transmit any kind of message to the outside, except the opposite of what is intended.

Seeing the city as a constantly growing hub of interrelations – and information technology helps us to understand this metaphor more easily – we are better able to realize the need for an extra-disciplinary approach, as has long been the theory of the best contemporary philosophy. And as the images in our minds are transformed there is also a change in objects, in things and in the horizons of this world and in our sense of the people who live there. That is why, though I do not know to what extent it is the expression of the above, the collaboration of those responsible at the Housing Authority and the New York Police Department with Atelier Pagnamenta Torriani is to be welcomed with favor, encouraged and supported.

The aim of the project is clear and stated by the architects themselves: “The design intent is to create a building that conveys a sense of reassurance to the public by its transparency and light-filled structure”.
The extraordinary thing is that this intent has been understood, accepted with awareness and consequently esteemed by the police officers themselves who have a direct interest as the future users of the building. The very concept of security has thus changed. It is seen as an aim to be achieved by a different approach and different relations from those envisaged until this day as being relevant to police areas and public areas.

The physical situation mostly blocky, tower-in-the-park structures, informed the decision to maintain a simple, rectilinear concept, related to the urbanism of the street.
The free-form inserted opposite the entrance hall serves as the muster room and is also available for public use.
The building is organized very directly, utilizing two visually shifting bars to house both the office/working spaces and the support spaces.

The main façade element, a translucent starphire glass wall equipped with temperature and humidity sensors and performing several functions in the design like thermal buffer, visual screen and light diffuser, is designed to optimize the flow of natural light to the interior of the police station, while becoming a light-filled beacon during the night.

And so, even when it is dark, the building never fails to achieve the intent of the project: to reconcile the apparent contrast between the need for transparency and that of security.

 

Atelier Pagnamenta Torriani: www.atelier-pt.com