US diplomats add a moat to their expenses at $1bn London embassy

The United States has unveiled plans for its new $1 billion high-security embassy in London — the most expensive it has ever built.

The proposals were met with relief from both the present embassy’s Mayfair neighbours and the residents and developers of the Battersea wasteland where the vast crystalline cube, surrounded by a moat, will be built.

The decision to abandon the former site in Grosvenor Square by 2016 came after a prolonged battle with residents angered by the security measures demanded after the September 11 attacks. More than a hundred residents took out a full-page advertisement in The Times to oppose tighter measures that they said would leave the area more vulnerable to attack.

The new embassy, on a former industrial site behind Battersea power station known for its gay clubs, will be designed by Kieran Timberlake, the Philadelphia architect.

The people who determine how to spend our tax money need to be thrown out of office.

This is an offense of the highest order.

Especially now.

If some of the world's billionaires want to donate to and build this, so be it...but for now...we need to start a revolution and get the people who spend our money to start STRIPPING idiot programs and pork and BALANCE THE DAMN BUDGET before ONE MORE SINGLE NEW ITEM is ADDED TO OUR EXPENSE LIST....INCLUDING THE HORRIFIC HEALTH CARE DEBACLE THAT THOSE SPENDING OUR MONEY want to lay upon us when those horrific men and women WILL NOT EVEN BE UNDER THEMSELVES!!!

KieranTimberlake chosen to build ‘modern, open’ U.S. Embassy in London

The State Department has announced that a Philadelphia-based architecture firm has won the closely watched competition to design the new U.S. Embassy in London. KieranTimberlake, which also designed an innovative and environmentally sustainable structure for Washington’s Sidwell Friends School, beat out three other major architectural firms.

The design calls for a secure and environmentally efficient glass cube set atop a colonnade in a landscape with a pond and pathways open to the public. Speaking from London, architect James Timberlake called it “an urban building in an urban park.”

The other finalists, in a process that began with 37 entrants and was winnowed to four over the past year and a half, were Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Morphosis Architects and Richard Meier & Partners Architects.

Seeking fresh thinking

The decision to open the design selection to competition is rare but not unprecedented — this is the fourth time the State Department has done so — demonstrating the importance of the London embassy to the United States’ long-standing relationship with Great Britain. It might also reflect the State Department’s desire for fresh and deeper thinking about how to design aesthetically pleasing but secure facilities. In recent years, the government has relied on standard embassy designs as it worked to rapidly replace or upgrade overseas facilities in the nervous post-2001 environment. Many of those were criticized for being fortresslike, forbidding, and isolated from their surroundings and the people they serve.

The choice of the KieranTimberlake design suggests that the more open process has yielded exactly what the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations was looking for: “a modern, open and secure” building that was sensitive to London’s architectural context.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/23/AR2010022302193.html

Set on a site of almost five acres on the south side of the Thames River, the new structure will be positioned on an angle to the surrounding streets. A semicircular pond will function as a protective moat along the Thames side, while a spiraling landscape to the south sets the building away from potential car or truck bombs. A complex envelope of blast-resistant glass and a polymer skin (known as ETFE) will provide both security and energy efficiency while shading the building on its sun-exposed sides.

“I have to be careful in talking about specific security requirements of this particular building,” Timberlake said. “But the glass skin is quite robust.”

It also helps the building, which is estimated to cost about $500 million, put a transparent face to the city and maximizes natural light for workers inside. Photovoltaics in the building’s skin and on its roof will generate electricity.

Design drawings show a cube that shimmers and dissolves in muted rhythms both vertically and horizontally. The spiraling landscape continues as a motif inside the building, culminating in the “ever more focused, secure and enclosed center atop the structure.”

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