Ambassadors of Ugliness

In this City Journal article, Theodore Dalrymple reveals that recent American embassies exemplify the failures of modernist architecture, producing ugly, undignified structures that fail to project American taste, prestige, or civilizational virtue.

• The U.S. embassy in London, designed by KieranTimberlake and opened in 2018 at a cost of $1 billion, is described as hideous and banal, resembling a provincial junk-food headquarters with no grace.
• The new embassy in Maputo, Mozambique, completed in 2021, features a facade resembling a giant Parmesan cheese about to fall, sharing the same lack of dignity as its London counterpart.
• The American consulate in Milan, by SHoP Architects, is architectural incompetence and visual vandalism that disdains the city’s heritage despite a restored neoclassical entrance, cloaked in empty bureaucratic rhetoric about celebrating local tradition.
• In Lima, the 1995 embassy’s modernist slab with mean square windows fails to convincingly reference indigenous culture and appears domineering, unlike the dignified Spanish colonial style of the earlier 1940s embassy.
• The upcoming Beirut embassy, projected at $1 billion and the second-largest after Baghdad, prioritizes utilitarian criteria like functional, sustainable, and restrained palette over beauty or visual environment.
• Modernist architecture, influenced by figures like Gropius and Le Corbusier, is inherently inhuman, totalitarian in spirit, and obsessed with fleeting originality at the expense of timeless dignity.
• Attempts to incorporate local traditions in modern designs collapse into indecipherable or incongruous references, rejecting successful pastiche in favor of ideological abstraction.
• Embassies should embody a nation’s taste and virtues through beauty; entrusting them to bureaucrats and modernists results in structures that suggest an ugly or tasteless country.

Read the full story:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-embassies-modern-architecture-buildings