The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies
BY JANE C. LOEFFLER
Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, 2010
Available for purchase from Amazon and Princeton Architectural Press
Cover photo left: U.S. Embassy, New Delhi, India
Background photos below: U.S. Consulate, Yokohama, Japan. Architect: Jay Morgan, 1932), built as replica of the White House; U.S. Embassy, London. Architect: Eero Saarinen, 1960, photo by Balthazar Korab, Library of Congress.
Moynihan endorsed Loeffler book in 1998, others followed—diplomats, architects, critics & academics; and it is still the “go-to” reference in its field more than twenty years later.*
*Buy THE ARCHITECTURE OF DIPLOMACY: BUILDING AMERICA’S EMBASSIES on AMAZON or from PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS. IT IS STILL IN PRINT!
The first endorsements for The Architecture of Diplomacy were the blurbs on its back cover. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan happily wrote a blurb because he believed so strongly in the importance of good design for federal architecture. He even called specific attention to the book in his remarks to the “Balancing Security and Openness” Symposium co-sponsored by GSA and the State Department in 1999.
The Architecture of Diplomacy is a splendidly presented treatise on both subjects. Which is to say diplomacy as well as architecture. Beginning in the 1950s, as new nations came into being across the globe, the United States built new embassies designed as statements of recognition and welcome. Almost invariably, the new countries began as democracies, and our new buildings were intended to express the achievement and accomplishment of American democracy. As much as modernism can do, was done. If many of these buildings now stand as a reproach to existing regimes, so be it. The State Department planners of the 1950s built better than they knew!
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to India, 1973-75; Honorary Member, AIA
Others who blurbed the book included design critics, diplomats, political scientists and architects (and their wives). It even won notice from The New Yorker.
This excellent book could not appear at a more important and timely moment, when the United States faces the dual challenge of building embassies around the world that are constructed as fortified defenses against terrorism and still meant to convey the symbolic values of American democracy. The addition and appraisal of current designs that update the book’s earlier history of embassy architecture define the dilemma and highlight the need for better solutions.
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic, The Wall Street Journal [2010]
The recent bombings in Kenya and Tanzania have endowed this conscientious, illuminating study of the State Department’s Cold War building boom with unfortunate topicality. Competing with the Russians, who stuck with Stalinist structures, the Americans opted for modernism; consequently, the book’s illustrations are a somewhat damning panorama of yesterday’s avant-garde. Since the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, however, art has taken second place to security.
The New Yorker [Sept. 7, 1998]
Many writers have written about my husband, Edward Durell Stone who died in 1978. The writing here by Jane C. Loeffler about Mr. Stone is accurate, something many writers have ignored. The truth is highly important when speaking of an individual who was a creative giant. The cover of The Architecture of Diplomacy features Edward’s embassy building in New Delhi, India. Without a doubt is has been considered the most beautiful of all the embassies built in that era. Frank Lloyd Wright praised it calling it ‘The Taj Maria’. I am complimented…Jane’s book brought back graceful memories. I thank her.
Maria Durell Stone, [2010]
Jane Loeffler’s precise, beautifully written book about America’s most important overseas buildings is a joy to read. Anyone who likes architecture, history, politics … or even vaudeville (see the part about Sol Bloom) … will devour Architecture of Diplomacy. We project our values and, in some ways, our national mood via the embassies and consulates we construct; I feel fortunate to have found Loeffler’s book to explain it all to me so engagingly. Brava.
CK13, Amazon reviewer [2019]
Featured Book Reviews
In METROPOLIS in August, 1998, Philip Nobel wrote: “The Architecture of Diplomacy reads like a Washington political thriller.” That was the book’s first published review, followed by more in a wide array of publications—academic/scholarly, professional, popular…even literary. Excerpts include these:
In The Architecture of Diplomacy Jane Loeffler has produced an original study on the building of American embassies, consulates and residences. This will not only appeal to historians of twentieth-century American architecture but, for the diplomatic historian, there is concrete evidence of America’s relationships with other countries. Loeffler’s thorough account, based primarily on archival sources, provides evidence of the development of a projection of image abroad of the twentieth century’s most powerful state through building projects that were tied to both domestic politics and international affairs. The choice and availability of sites, the financing of building projects overseas, an ever complex array of functional and symbolic requirements in embassy buildings and, increasingly, security issues, are considered… this is a refreshing attempt to place the building of American embassies in the context of American foreign and domestic policy.
Melanie Hall, Boston University, in Diplomacy and Statecraft
[Nov. 2000]
It is a happy coincidence when the right author deals with the right subject. The author, Jane C. Loeffler…is well qualified to undertake the extensive research necessary for such a study. And the subject–the evolution of architectural policy and practice in the construction of the several hundred offices and living quarters since World War II–is difficult, complicated, and important. Loeffler’s extensive research in State Department documents, congressional hearings, periodical publications, and biographic materials has resulted in a remarkably rich narrative that gives full scope to the various views of the participants. She is also not afraid to express her own opinion on the various personalities and problems.
Loeffler has covered this complex history…with great care, considerable sympathy, and remarkable understanding. Her judgments on men and buildings are sound. As she indicates in her conclusion, she regards this book as a pioneer in its field. And she has every right to consider it a formidable basis for future scholarship.
Fred Latimer Hadsel, United States Ambassador, Retired, in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
[Jun. 2000]
The worst public building in any American town is almost certain to have been built in the 1950s…Yet the fifties were the decade when, as Jane C Loeffler’s engaging and important book describes, the United States government began a conscious program of constructing embassies abroad designed as statements about America and as messages to other nations, particularly the newly-emerging states of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The United States was becoming aware of itself as the “leader of the free world” and, engaged in the bitter cold war contest with the Soviet Union, recognized architecture’s potential as a dramatic way to demonstrate that America as a superpower not only was rich and strong, but also creative, friendly, and open to others.
Running through Loeffler’s book is the thread of an American epic spanning the decades from innocent confidence to brash imperiousness to today’s reluctant and wary acceptance of the responsibilities of leadership. The epic is not ended. Decisions about its next chapter will have to be made soon if the future is not to be largely left in the hands of some uncertain fate… Like the stock market, architecture seems able to anticipate societal change, and so warrants careful watching…But if architecture is a leading indicator, then American diplomacy today is deteriorating and withdrawing. Loeffler’s book is an indispensable contribution to understanding our current diplomatic problems and an invitation to think seriously about how to solve them.
Charles Hill, Yale University, in American Studies International
[Feb. 1999]
Insightful and meticulously researched, this fascinating history of America’s embassy-building program is filled with stories of international intrigue and bureaucratic snarls. Beginning with the dawn of the Cold War, Loeffler explores the forces and challenges—political, financial, social, symbolic—that affect such projects… Building an embassy is a supremely complicated feat, this book ably shows, one requiring as much diplomacy as design.
Christine Liotta Sheridan in Architectural Record
[Jan. 1999]
This book covers a neglected chapter of American architectural history, the history of American embassies around the world, from the earliest beginnings in the 19th century to the present effort to build in the new capital city of Berlin. The author is an accomplished historian, and she has written a fascinating, readable, and scholarly chronicle…For all architecture collections in larger public as well as academic libraries.
Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Center, in Library Journal
[Aug. 1998]
Jane C Loeffler’s clearheaded study uncovers the sometimes petty politics, both governmental and architectural, that have plagued US diplomatic design… Leading lights dim in Loeffler’s steely analysis…And so it remains to be seen how seriously the US regards the once valued notion that architecture might ably represent its interests and ideals abroad.
Chuck Twardy in World Architecture
[Dec., 1998/Jan., 1999]
The first comprehensive history of American embassy design reads more like a political thriller. The first publication of Jane C. Loeffler’s research into the design of American embassies, a September 1990 article in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, was greeted with considerable excitement in that circle. The postwar embassy building program—with its precocious embrace of Modern architecture as a symbol of democracy, its scenic entanglement in Cold War machinations, and its value as a case study of government patronage—was widely understood to be a complex, fascinating, and under-examined episode in the larger story of the institutionalization of Modern architecture in the United States. Many of the individual buildings were well known (some, like Edward Durell Stone’s 1957 embassy in New Delhi, were overexposed from the first sketch), but until Loeffler’s 1990 article, no one had tried to paint the bigger picture.
Now, with the publication of The Architecture of Diplomacy, that picture is complete. Loeffler seems to have infiltrated the State Department at every level to find the political, social, stylistic, and financial forces that shaped each embassy building. All buildings come into being at the behest of such influences, but here the situation is extreme: architects and the politicians who directed them had to balance programmatic, symbolic, functional, budgetary, and public opinion concerns for multiple audiences in the United States and each host country.
Philip Nobel in METROPOLIS
[Aug./Sept. 1998]
Clarifiant empiriquement les stratégies politiques et les processus de décision qui influent sur l’architecture, Jane C. Loeffler se garde d’envelopper I’édifice dans une aura d’indépendance symbolique, tout en dégageant les grands thêmes de réflexion relatifs à la recherche d’une image architecturale apte à symboliser une nation. En dépit de la condamnation officielle de l’art contemporain sur son propre sol, c’est par le modernisme que les États-Unis choisissent de traduire pour le monde, entre 1946 et 1954, leur message de liberté.
Ariane Wilson in L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui
[Mar./Apr. 2001]