Having outgrown its 1960 embassy, a Kennedy- era modernist design by Eero Saarinen, the U.S. State Department has decided that London is too important to build one of its conventional insults to local sensibilities.
Sometime in 2013, a glass cube rising 12 tall levels atop a shrubbery-fringed mound and estimated to cost $500 million will sprout on the south bank of the Thames.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Louis Susman announced in London the selection of a design by Philadelphia architectural firm KieranTimberlake. The company is known for adventurous, energy-conserving designs at Yale University and in Washington.
From renderings released by the State Department, the design looks like the architectural face of Obama-era diplomacy. The embassy is discreetly fortified and ambitiously, conspicuously green.
The embassy will rise from a 5-acre plot on Nine Elms Lane as the centerpiece of an 18-acre residential and commercial redevelopment.
