INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION
In a historic moment when the integrity of nation states is being challenged by global conflict and complicated by internal strife, the result of years of in-attendance to questions of equity, justice, and a democratic process , representing a ‘country’ through architecture becomes increasingly difficult. And yet, the representation of nations continues to be addressed through international expositions, biennales, and trade fairs on a continual basis, usually drawing out pointed themes that address the incremental changes of a culture. Within this context, the embassy as a cultural institution bears a larger responsibility to present a broader –and evolving—representation of its people, values, agendas, and economies—embodying not only its history, but also its future aspirations. The embassy is also a nation’s “front door”: it is the first threshold though which citizens of other nations enter into a country: technically, the grounds on which the embassy sits is actually the sovereign territory of the nation it represents –something that has created as many historic opportunities as complexities.1 The reality is that the American brand is globally omni-present, first and foremost, through its media/products—from television to Hollywood, and from food franchises to technologies, all of which precede any architectural representation as such. No matter what, as the first point of contact, the embassy is possibly the first physical experience an individual engages with this nation, most often as a welcoming , to communicate, and to establish productive relations. This studio will examine questions of representation, in a myriad of architectural modalities, that attempt to speak to the mission of cultural identity in all its complexities and contradictions.
AN URBAN PROPOSTION: THE IMPERATIVE OF SECURITY AND POROSITY
As an urbanistic proposition, the embassy complex invariably straddles two postures, on the one hand, an open door that invites in, and on the other consumed by security measures and protocols that protect and serve those who occupy the property and practice diplomacy. While the daily business of the embassy requires a certain measure of security, the compound must be designed for the height of diplomatic tensions; many US embassies are, in effect, self-sustaining compounds, islands within urban environments that may need to be secured for hostility, at any given moment. Because of this, there emerges an interesting representational dilemma in forming the embassy as a signifier: how to communicate openness when embedding security features that make for an indominable fortress. This contradiction is at the core of any embassy design, but possibly more so for those nations whose dominance as super-powers serves as a bastion for challenge. Ironically, understanding the constraints of security measures may become the single most important vehicle to overcome them from a visual standpoint; but also, given the presence of security logistics in all urban environments, this is an opportunity to explore how insular campuses, buildings, and environments might produce veritable spaces of urban exchange, where the rules of engagement make it virtually implausible. These paradoxical conditions demand Embassy design to balance high performance tectonics with accessibility, sustainability with local culture, democratic equanimity with security. Therefore, the embassy environment take on the function of the most public form of diplomacy—It is the embodiment of diplomacy through design.
INTERPRETING HISTORY: BEFORE AND AFTER GROPIUS
Having selected the American Embassy in Athens as the site of speculation, we are collaborating with the U.S. Department of States’ Bureau of Overseas Building and Operations to address a range of themes whose academic spectrum offers ample space for experimentation. One of the most salient features of this site is the evidence of layered histories: Athens as city of deep archaeologies, the 20th century city within which the embassy complex sits, the presence of the Walter Gropius’s building as an icon to be addressed: all these factors require a sense of history with which you might redefine its characteristic features, while leaving room for transformation, invention, and a renewed vision.
In many ways, the Gropius Embassy is an embodiment of American values as they were being broadcast in the 20th century—post-World War II, in an era when the United States enjoyed the benefits of global trust, having saved European forces from the atrocities of Nazi and Fascist states. At the same time, the political mission of the embassies of the 1950’s and 60’s was to secure the image of American benevolence, and architecture was a central agent in projecting that image: of transparency, civic openness, and an ethos of democracy.
Not by any means his most memorable building, the stoa of the embassy surrounds an otherwise generic office building, whose aims are to communicate openness and a cultural affiliation with its context, a duck yearning for local recognition. Nonetheless, with an open base, the porosity that he induces is something that can be built on, especially as one views the campus as a piece of urbanism. Operating in, on, and around Gropius will offer students the humility of inhabiting a different authorship if only to assess the function of representation in architecture. Invariably, adaptive re-use involves aspects of restoration, renovation, and intervention that allow for significant nuances in architectural sensibilities to emerge whether in reverence to history, a transformation of it, or a challenge to it. Additionally, the program is larger than the Gropius building can contain and will require planning and design of the larger site and new structures across which the program will be distributed. The programmatic complex will give ample room for students to explore the many identities these buildings may invoke, tapping into archaeologies past and future, to imagine a sense of time within the site, situating a new intervention as part of a dialogue with history itself. We will ask students to look beyond the figure and its surface, to the spatial organization of the complex, identifying typological and configurational arrangements that embody the semantic panorama that this studio invites. By extension, we also invite students to look more deeply into construction systems, whose tectonics invoke representational capacities that transcend the conventions from which they emerge. This is a studio that invites the students to produce new forms of knowledge through the speculative process of rethinking representation.
1 Beyond Julian Assange who famously took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012, there are many other historical figures who have adopted a similar path for varied reasons, from Juan Guillermo, Baron de Ripperda who was sought for embezzlement in 1726, to the more recent 100 Burundian students who took refuge in the United States Embassy in 2015, fearing persecution from Burundi.