Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

The February, 2002, issue of Architectural Record presents the new United States embassy building in Moscow, Russia. Perhaps calling it the new, new embassy building would have been more accurate: in 1985 the United States discovered that those wily Soviet construction workers had been implanting listening devices in the reinforcing bars embedded throughout the poured-in-place concrete walls and slabs. This effectively made the entire building a giant ‘listening device’. At that point worked stopped, the Soviet Union was soon replaced by the Russian Federation, 240 million dollars were appropriated to deconstruct part of the building (65% complete at the time work stopped) the architectural firm Hellmut, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) was retained for the redesign and - finally - the building was completed last year.

In addition, the article notes that, “The State Department demanded a number of specialized security features, including shielding and blast protection, no-break power systems, and raised access flooring.” More to the point, it is noted, parenthetically, that, “For security reasons, the architect could not provide further details about the interior above the second floor, the security features, or the building products.” We are, however, provided a few photographs and a plan of the first floor. As for security, suffice it to say that some concrete supplier was made very happy by this building. The walls are really thick, constructed more like a military outpost than one might associate with a diplomatic facility. While striving mightily to minimize the sense of barracks, the building is a study in paranoia, inside and out. Attack, it appears, is imminent. HOK, with a use of language that would have made George Orwell proud, wrote that the new Moscow building, “metaphorically conveys the freedom and openness of the United States.”

And remember: this building is set among friends. Reconstruction did not begin until half a decade after the fall of the ‘evil empire’. Of course ‘friends’ is a relative term. The embassy buildings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan for instance - also ostensibly buddies of the United States - are certainly no less ‘open and free’. In fact, all United States embassy buildings are designed pretty much the same and for pretty much the same reasons: most of the world maintains a precarious friendship with the United States at best. As the citizens of the United States now know so well, while some are murderously angry at the United States, many more are happy to cheer them on when they act on this impulse.

But why? The answer, unfortunately, is simple, even if the particulars are sometimes not: the United States is at the epicenter of the largest empire the world has ever known. Buttressed primarily by the countries of western Europe, the empires of the past - Alexander, Napoleon, Egypt, and even Rome - pale in comparison to the scope of this empire. Like all empires, control of available territory and resources is the essential element. In addition, the political systems of other nations are also subject to scrutiny and, if deemed necessary by Washington, changed. This is not new: in 1965 Tom Lehrer observed in his acerbic album, “That Was the Year That Was” :

What do we do? We send the Marines! / For might makes right,/ And till they've seen the light,/ They've got to be protected, / All their rights respected, / 'Till somebody we like can be elected.

Members of the corps / All hate the thought of war, / They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means. Stop calling it aggression, / O we hate that expression. / We only want the world to know That we support the status quo. / They love us everywhere we go, / So when in doubt, Send the Marines!

Many throughout the world can ruefully attest to this. Noam Chomsky and others have observed that the United States often views the resources of others as United States resources - and adjust things as required to make it so: think Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, etc. Even those who dismiss Chomsky as a hard core leftist - unfairly in my opinion - have a harder time dismissing the ecological analysis. We in the west - and particularly in the United States - command a far larger ‘ecological footprint’ than most of the world. The ‘ecological footprint’ is basically defined as the quantity of resources each of us uses in our daily lives. It has been calculated that if everyone in the world were to live the way we in the west do it would require the resources of several earths. In fact, most of the world’s inhabitants live a life of poverty and hunger, some of which I have witnessed first-hand. It is not to stretch human nature too far to see where anger and even rage might result. The concept of ‘fairness’ that I have written about so often in the past as the critical ingredient to the sustainability of our republic, is true world wide as well.

Most of us in the west prefer not to think about it much or, worse, accept the self-righteous nonsense too often heard here that the world hates us because of our essential goodness. This creates the cognitive dissonance that allows HOK to speak for many when they describe their new fortress-embassy in Moscow as, “metaphorically convey(ing) the freedom and openness of the United States”.

Sadly, even if we individually find this situation abominable each of us in the west is the beneficiaries of the perks of empire. We live well. We expect to live well. But the reality is that the imbalance that characterizes all empires is not sustainable. There have been periodic rumblings throughout the world that have for more than a century required the United States and its allies to maintain a massive (and growing) army, navy, and air force, not to mention CIA and other covert agencies. Might, as Tom Lehrer also noted, makes right. But even if you find no moral problem with this and you feel that you deserve to live far better than most you still have to wonder, how long can the party last?