“There were security concerns,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”

The move is a depressing, if not wholly unpredictable, example of how the lingering trauma of 9/11 can make it difficult for government bureaucracies to make rational decisions. It reflects a tendency to focus on worst-case scenarios to the exclusion of common sense, as well as a fundamental misreading of the sign and the message it conveys. And if it is carried out as planned, it will gut a design whose playful pop aesthetic is an inspired expression of what America is about.

Just as disheartening, it underscores how the desire for security continues to override the spirit of openness that is fundamental to a functioning democracy.

The General Services Administration’s efforts to raise the quality of government architecture date to 1994, when it established its Design Excellence Program to reverse a decades-long trend of government commissions going to firms with the deepest political connections rather than to those with the most talent. One of the program’s greatest accomplishments is that it was able to maintain its high standards of design despite mounting security concerns that began with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

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The visual transparency of projects like Richard Meier’s district courthouse in Central Islip, N.Y., completed in 2000, and Morphosis’ 2007 federal building in San Francisco, were proof that it was possible to pump up security without transforming government buildings into fortified bunkers, even as the country’s anxiety mounted over fears of more terrorist attacks.

The Massena station is the latest chapter in that history. As you come over the St. Lawrence River on the bridge from Canada, you see the big sign looming directly in front of you.

The metal letters spelling out “United States” are painted the yellow of a yield sign. Their top halves are tucked underneath a translucent polycarbonate screen that encloses the second floor of the building, giving them a blurry quality and imbuing the sign with a sense of mystery. You wonder, is this simply an emblem of American pride, or is there something more nuanced going on here? Some private code the viewer is meant to decipher?

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The answers are in the architecture.

As you approach the station, yellow lines funnel you into one of several lanes — some for cars, some for commercial trucks — before disintegrating into a series of yellow bollards that lead to checkpoints to the right and left of the main building. A few yards from the guard booth, ominous-looking security cameras and warning signs flank you on both sides.

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Those with a paranoid turn of mind may feel they have entered a gantlet in which they are relinquishing more and more control to government authority with every step. But any such impression is quickly tempered by a sense of ease of movement. There are no curbs anywhere, which emphasizes the smooth, flowing surface of the asphalt. The slender canopies over the checkpoints resemble airplane wings on a runway, as if parts of the complex were preparing to take off.

This tension — between the need for control and the architects’ desire to create a feeling of lightness and transparency — is apparent everywhere in the design of the crossing station. A few hundred feet beyond the main building, for example, is the Nonintrusive Inspection Building — a giant X-ray machine for trucks. One side of this structure, made of corrugated metal, has a narrow slot window along its base so that from the crossing area the wall seems to be floating, unsupported from below. The back wall, by contrast, is made of one-foot-thick poured-in-place concrete, both to absorb radiation from the X-ray machine and to protect the site’s perimeter.

Even the arrangement of the buildings is more complicated than it at first seems. The big open spaces between them give the site an open, airy quality. But when I asked Laurie Hawkinson, one of the architects, about the layout, she said it was partly designed to create view corridors, so that border officers could monitor anyone approaching them from the surrounding woods.

To some, Smith-Miller & Hawkinson’s mix of pop references and tough everyday materials will bring to mind Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who famously celebrated the architecture of the Las Vegas strip in the early 1970s. It also owes a debt to the work of postwar Los Angeles architects like Charles and Ray Eames, who were striving to create an architecture that reflected the optimism of the postwar era. Their lightweight structures, made of everyday mass-produced materials, were the sunny face of cold war America.

But in Massena that optimism has been carefully ratcheted down. The buildings’ translucent plastic surfaces are not only about light; they suggest a cautious, at times shadowy, interior world. The lightness of the forms reminds us of how fragile our ideals can sometimes be.

In fact, the sign itself demands multiple readings. Unlike the Freedom Tower, whose name could be interpreted as a jingoistic expression of America’s post-Sept. 11 arrogance, Smith-Miller & Hawkinson’s “United States” sign is politically neutral. Its meaning is constantly changing for the viewer. It communicates openness and possibility, not aggression.

It is hard to see how values like those would make any building a target. They may even seem like something worth defending. They certainly put into question the thinking behind Customs and Border Protection’s decision. It is as if the government is attuned to architecture’s symbolic power, but unable to decipher its meanings.