A New Fort, er, Embassy, for London

February 24, 2010 - Architecture Review
A New Fort, er, Embassy, for London
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

LONDON — The State Department’s announcement on Tuesday that it had selected a design by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake for its new embassy in London was not exactly uplifting news.

The proposed building — a bland glass cube clad in an overly elaborate, quiltlike scrim — is not inelegant by the standards of other recent American Embassies, but it has all the glamour of a corporate office block. It makes you wonder if the architects had somehow mistaken the critic Reyner Banham’s famous dismissal of the embassy’s 1960 predecessor on Grosvenor Square — “monumental in bulk, frilly in detail” — as something to strive for.

The project as a whole, however, is a fascinating study in how architecture can be used as a form of camouflage. The building is set in a spiraling pattern of two small meadows and a pond that have as much to do with defensive fortification as with pastoral serenity: an eye-opening expression of the irresolvable tensions involved in trying to design an emblem of American values when you know it may become the next terrorist target.

It’s hard to think of a project, in fact, that more perfectly reflects the country’s current struggle to maintain a welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack.

The design was chosen after a yearlong competition following the department’s decision to relocate the embassy from its address in central London to an isolated light-industry zone south of the Thames River — a project that is expected to cost a billion dollars.

The present embassy, a Modernist landmark by Eero Saarinen that takes up the entire western end of Grosvenor Square, is still regarded skeptically by critics. Its main facade, an intricate composition of limestone window frames, sits uncomfortably alongside the Georgian-style town houses that flank the park to the north and south. A menacing gilded eagle caps the main entry.

Yet the old embassy was also an effort to project a progressive cultural image abroad, at the height of the cold war. One entry led straight from the street up a broad staircase to a public library and an art gallery that showcased postwar American artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Philip Guston. (A longtime embassy employee remembers that security was so lax in the early days that a single guard stood at the door, supporting himself with a cane.)

The use of architecture and art as tools of cold war propaganda was already on the wane by the end of the 1970s, when a lack of space forced embassy officials to shut down the gallery and transform the library into a waiting room for visa applicants. But it was completely abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11.

A metal fence went up in front of the main entry stairs. Two small pavilions — their boxy Modernist forms apparently intended as a homage to Saarinen’s original creation — were built out front to screen visitors.

Even so, the embassy falls short of current security requirements, which include, among other things, a 30-meter defensive perimeter around the building. And the maze of bollards and fences that went up in the last decade caused an uproar among Londoners, many of whom saw it as a desecration of one of the city’s loveliest (and most expensive) neighborhoods.

The site for the new embassy solves some of these problems while raising others. A 4.8-acre lot midway between Vauxhall station and the abandoned Battersea power station, it is at a comfortable remove from the city’s dense historic center.

At any given time, there is rarely more than a handful of pedestrians passing along the street. A couple of warehouses and a car dealership flank the site on either side; a postal sorting center sprawls behind it. The city has zoned the area for residential and commercial development, but there’s no way to know how long such development will take.

You could read KieranTimberlake’s building as an ode to Saarinen. Like the earlier design, it is essentially a box wrapped in an elaborate skin, albeit one that is more in tune with our ecologically minded times.

The entire glass cube, which sits on a colonnaded base, is conceived as a kind of high-efficiency solar collector, with all four sides covered in a second skin of pillowlike panels of ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE — a high-tech plastic. On the south, east and west facades, which will receive the most direct sunlight, the panels are covered with photovoltaic cells and supported by a lightweight cable-and-strut frame. The north facade shade is a simpler skin designed to deflect heat from the interiors.

The building is surrounded by an elaborate landscape that reaches out to the surrounding city. A semicircular pond borders the structure on one side, and terraced meadows wrap around the other. Pathways running alongside the meadows would connect the site to a proposed public promenade (part of the city’s plans for the development zone).

A narrow park runs between the pond and Nine Elms Lane, the main approach from the Vauxhall tube station. Conceptually, the landscape continues right up through the building, with a series of terraces carved into the facade.

The abundance of green space contributes to the design’s environmentally friendly image. Circuitous paths weave through the park, which in renderings is full of young professionals. The main entry plaza for the building, which extends along the edge of the pond before slipping under one side of the colonnade, is conceived as a lively public space.

But the real function of these landscape elements is to serve as camouflaged security barriers. The northern pond is a reflecting pool — but also a castle moat. To the south, a concrete wall frames the outer edge of the lower meadow, which can be patrolled by guards.

Above it, walled off by a second barrier, the higher meadow can be used for occasional embassy events but will otherwise be closed to the public. To get to the plaza, visitors will have to pass first through a high-security entry pavilion, much as they do to enter the current embassy.

A result is an architectural sleight of hand. And the effect is likely to be oddly disquieting: an array of clearly visible public zones that will actually be inaccessible to the public. And it probably will convey a more mixed message than the architects and their clients intended.

But given the impossibility of their task, it is hard not to feel compassion for the architects (particularly since KieranTimberlake is a relatively young and little-known firm). Yet both Richard Meier and Thom Mayne of Morphosis turned in far more sophisticated designs. Mr. Meier’s, which breaks the building mass down into a Cubist composition of curves and planes, is one of his best in recent years; Mr. Mayne’s, a distorted horseshoe wrapped around a deconstructed version of the Capitol dome in Washington, packs the most symbolic punch. (If you want to dismiss them as “star architects,” be my guest, but the designs explain why they got their reputations.)

More vexing, though, is how few visions there were to choose from. Of 37 American firms that applied for the competition, only 4 were invited to propose detailed designs. (The New York firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners also submitted a relatively conservative scheme.)

This is especially troubling at a time when American architecture has reached a state of crisis. A whole generation of talents has seen careers languish through lack of opportunity, while the reputations of their European counterparts have soared. Firms like Preston Scott Cohen, Daly Genik Architects and Greg Lynn Form, to name just a few, have been shut out of high-profile government commissions by a convoluted competition process that favors known quantities.

Who knows if they would have done better. But their inclusion would have made for a livelier, more informed debate, one that in itself would have been a step toward the democratic cultural identity the country is trying to promote.