Inside Out: A Tale of Two Embassies

By Joseph Giovannini

BEIJING | Gardens and courtyards

The Berlin site is woven into a dense urban fabric, but the embassy in Beijing, designed by Craig Hartman of the San Francisco office of SOM, sits within a gated island of walled space several ring roads removed from the Forbidden City.

The firms competing for the commission happened to be in Beijing on 9/11. “I watched CNN in horror all night,” remembers Hartman. “In downtown Beijing the next morning, hundreds of bouquets with condolences were placed at the U.S. Embassy. It was very moving, and for me it reinforced the symbolic importance of our embassy and our project’s mission.”

The U.S. government’s early analysis of the 500,000-square-foot program suggested two towering and vaguely threatening megastructures on the 10-acre site. Hartman had another idea. “The fundamental design challenge was to represent American values in a sovereign country that has a cultural reality so different from ours,” he said. “But that’s the question that informed our search: how to build notions of a Western democracy within another political system.”

Counterintuitively, the architects found cues to democracy in Beijing itself. “We walked around Beijing and discovered these hidden urban spaces that were extensions of the social life of neighborhoods,” says Hartman. “People walked around the streets in their pajamas, playing cards, and as you entered courtyards off the streets, you stepped into increasingly private realms. A series of gardens and courtyards seemed like a natural way to deploy the embassy’s program. As in the Forbidden City, the embassy could enjoy the openness behind a perimeter that was walled and secure.”

Within a gated, guarded enclave, the architect enjoyed considerable design freedom, and the large site allowed him to build densely, without resorting to megastructures that could be interpreted as arrogant or imperialist. He hybridized the paradigm of courtyard neighborhoods with the notion of pavilions in the garden — that is, with visually porous buildings that shape gardens in a figure—ground relationship. He was interested in the single, stand-alone object as it weaves exterior and interior space into what he calls “a platform for social life.” Foregrounding voids between buildings and developing them as landscaped “solids,” Hartman turned the walled site into not only an asymmetrical architectural checkerboard, but also an urbanized enclave where the buildings shape the streets and courtyards of a cloistered but animated town. “We wanted to blur the edges between public and private,” says Hartman, “and foster all that accidental rubbing between people.” The idea was to create fabric rather than object.

The Beijing embassy has many constituencies, from Chinese nationals applying for visas to administrative staff, Marine guards, ambassadors, and visiting dignitaries. By breaking down the site into its main programmatic parts, Hartman cast it as a security gradient — ranging from an exterior that provides the greatest protection to a garden street that links a series of interior and exterior public spaces and serves as the project’s social heart. This long spine connects an auditorium, café, conference rooms, post office, and commissary to create a linear place where everyone at the embassy can mix. “The site plan is like an artichoke,” says Hartman. “You peel away the layers to get at the center.”

The architect massed small, medium, and large buildings and adjusted their degree of porosity to shape the qualities of outdoor spaces. The east-facing consular entrance, which leads to a portico structure, is the first encounter many Chinese will have with America; its open, human-scaled spaces are simple and welcoming. Dignitaries arriving at the entrance on the south side drive across a forecourt to a formal front door. In both cases, a bridge leads through a lotus garden.

The courtyards and landscaped streets may be the elements binding diverse structures into an ensemble, but SOM also threaded the buildings together with a conceit that echoes China’s biggest monument, the Great Wall. Using dark-gray, fractured granite, the firm erected a great stone “dragon” wall that meanders through the gardens, into and out of buildings, integral yet independent. Like an archaeological stratum, the stone recalls old Chinese structures. Other materials, including lotus and bamboo, respect the genus loci. Referencing Chinese tradition through materials, if not form, did not mean the architects were mining history for sentimentalism; rather, they were abstracting the culture of a place to a material essence that was not historicist.

The delicacy of the reference, though, would have been crushed by the sheer mass of the eight-story chancery building, and the longer, lower support office building behind it, but Hartman counteracts the impression of a bunker with a deft use of glass. On the chancery, a glass thermal barrier envelops the core concrete structure, with its pillbox security windows; the transparent veils the solid. Throughout the enclave, the architects played the nuances of glass off the opacity of stone, allowing views between the gardens and the interiors in a reciprocal inside-outside relationship. The gardens provided the reason to open the buildings and confirm the metaphor of democracy as transparency, and the glass added a lightness of architectural being.

It is tempting to compare the two embassies because they were completed within months of each other. But they began a decade and a paradigm apart. The Beijing embassy was conceived and built relatively quickly in a snapshot of design time, while the Berlin embassy developed as a time-lapse photograph capturing changes in Berlin and American political regimes, and the shift to a new architectural generation. Patience was part of the job description. MRY played defense. In Beijing, the perimeter wall allowed SOM to play offense.

DESIGNS THAT LOOK INWARD

Both projects show creative responses to the hard facts of protecting American diplomats abroad, challenging the architects to build fortresses in the city. In Beijing, Hartman hid and opened buildings behind a wall, whereas in Berlin, the building was the wall — a wall that was largely shaped by Department of State and Berlin dictates. Tellingly, in both projects, the architects turned their designs inward, developing interior spaces nested in more complex forms. American embassies can no longer be judged by their covers. They are not books. The best are Easter eggs.

Joseph Giovannini is a New York–based critic and architectural designer who writes for a variety of publications.

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