Abivalent Embassies

The summer of 1969. Neil Armstrong had just taken one small step for mankind and it seemed incredibly hard not just to be proud of, but to actually not brag about, being an American. Meanwhile, on the far side of the world (at least that's what if seemed like at the time), the Viet Nam war was dragging the country deeper into a quagmire that seemed inextricable, and the rest of the world was beginning to see the country in a little less of a shining light.

In late August of that summer, I found myself with my mother in Athens, Greece needing a visa to travel north through Yugoslavia and several other Eastern Block countries to return to West Germany. To do this, we needed to check in at the American Embassy. Visualize a larger, imposing building with Marines in Dress Blue uniforms in front - it felt like we were calling on someone, or something, very important. And, we were - the United States of America seemed like it was at the apex of its weltanschauung as perceived by the rest of the world.

Flash forward to today. The perception of the United States by the rest of the world... - visualize something in your mind. Now, take that personal visualization and construct the idea of a new Embassy. Say... In London.

Poof! Does it look like one of the following? Does what you think the Obama Administration might want to project to the rest of the world look like one of these?









KieranTimberlake's design, the first photograph, won. The next three, were designed by Richard Meier Architects, Morphosis, and Pei Cobb Freed, in that order.

Here's what a few critics have said about the winning design:

Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian:
Cool, remote and superficially transparent, the winning design does reflect what we can divine of the US political process. Nominally open to all and yet, in practice, tightly controlled, the system of US government and its prevailing culture, aped bad-temperedly in Britain, does indeed inform the brief to KieranTimberlake and their response to it.

James S. Russell, US Architecture correspondent at Bloomberg:
Of course, it's difficult to create a compelling statement when America's place in the world is hotly contested at home and its international intentions are debated everywhere. America can't even create a coherent climate-change policy. This ambivalent embassy perfectly sums up the extraordinarily difficult Obama moment.



From my vantage point, this building appears somewhere at the convergence of Edward Durrell Stone, corporate America, and the USGBC LEED requirements. Is that what we have come to?

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