Opening Nights

During the past decade, the U.S. State Department has tried to put its best facade forward in building more than 30 new embassies and consulates.

In The Hague, Marcel Breuer built a blunt, lantern-windowed structure as stolid as a Dutch door. In Athens, Walter Gropius used the same Pentelic marble that forms the Parthenon. Edward Durell Stone's grillwork adorns New Delhi like a Hindu temple. In Baghdad, Jose Luis Sert put up a tentlike structure fit for a caliph and cooled by channels of river water. Saarinen warmed his Oslo embassy with teak screens; Yamasaki lightened his Kobe consulate with airy Japanese panels. The openings of U.S. embassies have come to be as eagerly anticipated as big Broadway first nights. This month the State Department opens two.

In Mexico City, where the press of tourism and business requires the U.S. to maintain its second biggest embassy (after London), the new building is a functional, if spiritless, product of Texas Architects R. Max Brooks and Llewellyn Pitts. Basically it is a chunky, $5,000,000 rectangular marble box rising six stories above some elegant but unrelated granite vaultwork. Since much of Mexico City sits on what was a lake, the building must be broad-footed to avoid sinking into muddy subsoil. A Mexican engineer, Leonardo Zeevaert, designed a displacement foundation that is in effect a watertight ship, and the weight of the building that it supports exactly equals the weight of the soil removed in excavation. Mexicans call it "the floating embassy."

By comparison the smaller $1,000,000 Dublin embassy, designed by Connecticut Architect John M. Johansen, is exciting in design and construction. Its cylindrical shape, on a 110-ft. diameter, presents, says Johansen, a "fac,ade that turns its back on no one." Made of concrete precast in Holland, the basic structural element is a twisted I, which, multiplied and dovetailed together, turns window frames into walls.

This vigorous fac,ade weaves through space like the interlacing illuminations in the Irish Book of Kells. Set on a rusticated granite base, the moated turret echoes ancient Celtic round castles scattered across the green countryside, recalls the Martello towers built to defend Ireland's coasts during Napoleonic times. Johansen even made studies of how soot streaks the concrete so that the walls would weather with character.

The embassy bespeaks an understanding of the nation it was built to befriend.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.