Steve Offutt dares to challenge the security bollards that have popped up in the last decade all over the city like so many fruiting bodies of concrete fungus. They won’t work, and they’re anti-people.
By now, the totality of those barriers must cover scores of acres of valuable sidewalk real estate. They create an unwelcome atmosphere to pedestrians, forcing them to weave and sometimes wait for others to make room just to walk to and from their destinations. Most of them are unsightly at best and downright ugly at worst. They have degraded the open space and welcoming feel of virtually every outdoor space in the core of DC.