“The new US embassy to the Court of St James’s has been designed, says the US state department, to “reflect the values of the American people”. Just as well, perhaps, that its architects, KieranTimberlake, aren’t being asked to reflect the values of the British people, otherwise we’d probably end up with a building in the guise of a footballer-style Kentucky Fried Georgian luxury mansion with a Cabe-approved Tesco attached and the whole caboodle opened by Justin Timberlake.
Luckily for London, the American people are considerably more sophisticated and less populist than we are. Here in Nine Elms, the new embassy will adopt the form of a giant glass box on stilts rising from a Princess Diana-style memorial park, complete with a lake and what appears to be a ha-ha. Seriously….
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.” These are Jonathan Glancey’s words on the new design for the US Embassy in London. Glancey’s comments drip in a certain British condescension.
Designed by the firm KieranTimberlake, the building attempts to go beyond mere symbolism of American ideal of “transparency” that a glass facade can offer. Instead, this design tries to encompass the ideas of ecological responsibility and friendliness within the lived environment. This is the choice of how America will be represented in London, and its a huge step up from the current Grosvenor Square compound which is an immediately hostile environment and feels locked in a Cold War past.
Based off of the rendering, it appears as though KieranTimberlake’s design will fulfill the vision of the State Department for an embassy. The design by Thom Mayne praised by Rogers (Pompidou Centre Paris) and Palumbo as being “touched by genius” sits on the same stilts in a similar undulating park that KieranTimberlake is criticized for by Glancey. The question is, would the British ever be happy with any design for American embassy in London?
Even more interesting: Do the British have any room to really complain when their Shanghai World Expo Seed Pavilion is an explosive, violent piece of architecture which literally attacks the visual and architectural space around it with 60,000 7.5m-long transparent acrylic rods?
it looks to me like an excellent idea.