los angeles CALIFORNIA
SCI-Arc
Critic: Elena MANFERDINI

If modern architecture formerly embodied hegemonic national power with equally singular form, today more striated and heterodox political structures require more multiplicitous modes of expression. Formerly stable bureaucracies have been replaced by spontaneous, market-driven clusters of agency. At the same time, states still require symbolic and physical manifestations of their authority. This thesis explores the potential in this conflict with an embassy prototype that simultaneously enacts and represents the United States’ newly fraught status on the international stage. Designed to be deployed in different postures relative to the ground depending on the relationship between the US and the embassy’s host country, the project couples monolithic legibility with shifting optical effects.
Embassy design has come under increasingly strict design regulations since the 1950s. The existing guidelines stipulate two parallel blocks separated by an atrium with a 300 feet radius of secured perimeter around them. My proposal is a prototype that meets these criteria while exposing the economic, military, and political instability that occasioned them. To do so, the project works in between iconicity and anonymity, consistency and flexibility, and transparency and opacity. A holographic, opalescent cube that indexes the security apparatus within presents a luminous yet impervious state of being in the world.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
AC: Walead Beshty, American Embassy Design Guidelines, Jasper Johns.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
AC: Gianni Vattimo - Weak Thoughts, Reinier De Graaf - Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, Azuma Makoto - Encyclopedia of Flowers III

sP: Whose work is currently in your radar?
AC: Snohetta, MILLIØNS, Mark Foster Gage, Gehry Partners, OMA, SO-IL.