By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 13, 2009; A05
UNITED NATIONS, March 12 -- Across the Manhattan street from the landmark buildings of the United Nations, a new architectural symbol of American outreach to the world is rising: an impenetrable concrete tower with 30-inch-thick concrete walls and no windows on its first seven floors.
Built to endure a chemical- or biological-weapon attack or an explosives-laden truck careening up Manhattan's First Avenue, the new U.S. mission to the United Nations will offer the most secure diplomatic quarters in history when it is completed next year.
The 26-story building is one of a new generation of hardened U.S. diplomatic outposts. More than 60 high-security embassies and consulates have been constructed in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa over the past eight years.
The primary goal is greater protection for the 20,000 American officials serving in those facilities, but the buildings have also been criticized as enduring symbols of the fears and anxieties that gripped the United States in the wake of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"The attacks of 9/11 are not a sufficient excuse for this bizarre edifice. I think the building sends an entirely wrong signal to the United Nations, and the world," said Stephen Schlesinger, an author who has written extensively on the United Nations. "Rather than being an approachable, beckoning embassy -- emphasizing America's desire to open up to the rest of the globe and convey our historically optimistic and progressive values -- it sits across from the U.N. headquarters like a dark, forbidding fortress, saying, 'Go away.' "
The latest quest to better guard America's diplomats began in 1998, when members of al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 5,000. A review of U.S. diplomatic security in the wake of the bombings concluded that more than 180 U.S. embassies and consulates were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and Congress mandated an unprecedented construction spree to replace those structures. The 9/11 attacks, which felled two Manhattan skyscrapers, only reinforced the need for safer buildings.
The Bush administration appointed Charles E. Williams, a retired major general from the Army Corps of Engineers, to lead the construction. Williams's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations developed a Standard Embassy Design, a one-size-fits-all blueprint that has produced dozens of high-security look-alike embassies and consulates for the State Department. Williams won praise for the speed with which the buildings went up, but also criticism that his approach sometimes resulted in shoddy work and, in the building of the $730 million embassy in Baghdad, contracting irregularities.
State Department officials defend the program, saying that a car bomb attack against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen last August underscored the threats still facing American personnel.
"We wish the world was a safer place," said Jonathan Blyth, a spokesman for the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. "However, in the last 10 years since the bombings in East Africa, the world is a more dangerous place. We need to construct facilities to put American diplomats in safe and functional facilities for them to advance foreign policy and ultimately, hopefully, make the world better, safer and more secure for all citizens of the world."
Blyth said that State has drawn on some of the world's best architects to build high-profile U.S. embassies in cities like Berlin and Beijing. The architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was recently awarded the American Institute of Architects' Excellence in Architecture Design Citation Award for the Beijing complex, perhaps the most elegant embassy.
But Richard J. Shinnick, who replaced Williams, has conceded that many of the U.S. buildings lack grace. In a talk to industry advisers in September, Shinnick described the past eight years as "the dark ages as far as the design culture was concerned."
Foreign critics have been hostile to the Standard Embassy Design. "There is hardly a modern building in existence -- with the exception of nuclear bunkers and pesticide-testing centers -- that is so hysterically closed off from public space as this embassy," Germany's conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said of the Berlin building.
John Rubell, whose firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects built that embassy, was taken aback by the lashing it received in the German news media, which he thought was unfair. But he said that it may be time for embassy architects to address the critics.
"We have to deal with certain realities," Rubell said. "The security issues are real, but at the same time we need to design buildings that don't primarily express that fact."
A glance at the U.N. mission makes it hard to think of anything else. Its rough concrete exterior contrasts with gleaming glass luxury towers that sprang up around Manhattan in the boom years that followed Sept. 11.
Charles Gwathmey, whose firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects designed the mission for the General Services Administration, said the building will feature an inviting glass entryway, set off by an Alexander Calder stabile, to passersby and visitors once the project is completed.
But the transparency ends at the lobby elevators. The windowless floors at the base of the building will be filled with computers and other high-tech equipment that cannot be described to the public.
Gwathmey was most proud of the building's concrete skin, noting that he had received a call from the renowned architect I.M. Pei, who asked him, " 'How did you get that beautiful concrete?' He thought it looked fantastic."
Here's a piece I wrote on the orginal building.
Published on: Monday, 8/30/2004, A section,
edition, zone, A21
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 28 Words: 1095 Slug:
'Ugly' U.S. Mission Building To Get Roomier Replacement New Headquarters at U.N. Designed to Withstand Terrorism
By Colum LynchWashington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- For more than 40 years, it has been the workplace of America's most famous ambassadors, including George H.W. Bush and Madeleine K. Albright. It has also served as a key staging ground for some of the country's most important diplomatic initiatives, including U.S. efforts to sell the world on its invasion of Iraq and to defuse a potential nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.
But the headquarters of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations doesn't generate much respect among the world's diplomatic set, whose members have derided the gray 12-story structure as an architectural eyesore that is unfit to house the world's lone superpower.
"It's ugly," said Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger. "And inside it's not very modern. I think the United States delegation deserves a better one."
The United States is set to get an upgrade. Construction workers will demolish the building on 45th Street and First Avenue over the next four months to make way for a heavily reinforced, 23-story high-rise that is designed to accommodate nearly twice the staff and survive a car bomb explosion.
The $4.4 million demolition has forced more than 160 American diplomats and support staff into a commercial building several blocks from U.N. headquarters, on 45th Street near Lexington Avenue, until the new building is completed in 2008.
The passing of the storied building, whose concrete, honeycombed facade once stirred fans of Modernist architecture, has generated little protest from the city's preservationists. Even former occupants are glad to see it go.
"It's lived its life," former U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte said in a formal ceremony convened to shutter the old building. "It's kind of worn out."
"I've been in it once," said his successor, John C. Danforth. "When I see it in passing, my heart does not skip a beat."
Another senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put it more bluntly: "They should have blown up the architect."
The building, which opened its doors in the spring of 1961, was not always so despised. For a country that had been ambivalent about the United Nations, the decision to erect a permanent mission across the street from U.N. headquarters was seen as a symbol of America's commitment to working with others to pursue peace. A New York Times editorial in March 1956 hailed U.S. plans to build "our own U.N. monument" as a powerful rebuke to "a few antediluvian isolationists in Congress who would like to have us pull out of this often annoying company and go it alone."
The effort faced bureaucratic, financial and political hurdles from the beginning, when American officials began looking for a site in 1947. The late U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. overcame the forces of Washington bureaucracy and American isolationism to make it happen, invoking fears that the Soviets were considering purchasing the site for their own mission. That, he warned, would constitute a "diplomatic Sputnik for them," a reference to the first man-made craft sent into space.
During Lodge's tenure, Congress appropriated about $3.7 million in March 1958 to begin construction. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose golden bust is displayed in the main conference room at the mission's transitional headquarters, vetoed the bill because of an unrelated dispute over civil servants' retirement funds. The bill was ultimately signed into law months later.
Inspired by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who helped design the U.N. headquarters, the firms Kahn & Jacobs and Kelly & Gruzen conceived the building in the Brutalist style, a form of architecture popular in the 1960s and 1970s that relied on sculpted, rough concrete surfaces.
"It was an expression by the U.S. government that we were to be associated with the same kind of modern values that shaped the creation of the United Nations," said Matt Postal, who once led walking tours of Modernist architectural buildings in Manhattan. Postal said that the building has since fallen on hard times. Its concrete facade is cracked and in need of a scrub. Inside, the mission is cramped and cluttered. The wiring is too old to accommodate modern electrical, security and computer networks, U.S. officials said.
Like its predecessor, the new building has taken more than a decade to finance and has faced intense resistance from the United Nations' toughest critics. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pledged in 1998 to fight it, saying, "I intend to do all I can to make sure that hardworking Americans don't pay for a State Department palace in New York."
The building's shell, which will be constructed by the General Services Administration, will cost $50 million to $60 million. The State Department will pay more than $12 million for renting the two spaces. To save money, the government scrapped plans for a permanent residence for the ambassador.
U.S. officials declined to discuss the cost or the practical impact the move will have on U.S. intelligence agencies that have long used the United Nations as a prime post for listening in on foreign diplomats.
The mission's transition to temporary quarters, meanwhile, has irritated some diplomats, who complained they have been squeezed into smaller cubicles while the mission's top three ambassadors have been given equal space. Still, many diplomats are grateful to flee a building that provided an inviting target for car bombers. Indeed, the design for the new mission has been influenced as much by terrorists as by the aesthetics of architecture or the principles of international cooperation.
The new building will be set back from the street, and the first six floors will be windowless, in an effort to prevent injury from exploding glass from a car bomb. Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp described the new mission as a "high-rise bomb shelter."
"The form and material gesture diplomatically toward friendship and transparency," he wrote. "Otherwise this is black helicopter stuff: a crisp but hulking tower of power."
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