New US Embassy In Baghdad Looks Like Suburban Sprawl

"The renderings also offer hints about how the U.S. embassy building program, which once ranked among our most impressive cultural exports, has lost its way architecturally. In the years after World War II, the State Department hired Wallace Harrison, Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen, among other leading Modernists, to design embassies around the world. While the buildings ranged in quality, they were linked by an interest in using crisp, cosmopolitan architecture to mark America's place in the world. As Jane Loeffler put it in her 1998 book, "The Architecture of Diplomacy," the architects "tried to convey something of American optimism in their designs."

..."An island within the island known as the Green Zone, the compound will include its own water purification and waste treatment systems; its own fire station, power plant and school; and housing for more than 380 families. Its site is a full 10 times larger than the second-largest American embassy, which is now under construction in Beijing."

..."This is not the architecture, as Engelhardt would have it, of domination or empire. This is the architecture of manufactured, blast-resistant banality. What BDY is selling to its government client is a compound whose spaces are wide open enough to admit a quiet, essentially suburban kind of sprawl."