Embassies, from landmark to bulwark

AMERICAN travelers may not know it, but they own a magnificent 18th century palace on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. After World War II, the U.S. government bought the building at this enviable address, and it now serves as the consular services division of the U.S. Embassy, a proud postage stamp of America and symbol of our long, complicated relationship with France.

The neoclassical Hotel de Talleyrand, as it is called, is one of the grandest of about 270 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world dedicated to promoting U.S. foreign policy and serving as the face of America abroad.

Some are as distinguished as the Hotel de Talleyrand in historic and architectural terms. But since the 1998 Al Qaeda bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, many more have been deemed a security risk and will soon be replaced in an unprecedented wave of embassy building. The construction, estimated to cost $17 billion, is aimed, above all, at safeguarding the people who work in American diplomatic installations abroad.

More than 200 people died as a result of the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, including 12 U.S. diplomats. The two attacks were hardly isolated incidents; embassies have become prime terrorist targets.

“Every year on Foreign Service Day in May, more names are added to the plaque at the U.S. State Department in Washington, commemorating members of the foreign service who have died in the line of duty,” John M. Evans, U.S. ambassador to Armenia, said in a telephone interview.

His mission has just moved into one of the new embassies mandated by the 1999 Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act. The State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, led by retired Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, recently completed 15 new embassy compounds in such countries as Turkey and Bulgaria; 39 others are being designed or constructed around the world; and contracts will soon be awarded for 13 more State Department facilities in foreign lands, which include embassies, consulates, office buildings and ambassadorial residences.

New or old, embassies generally are places of business, not museums or cultural centers open to casual inspection. Besides serving as the headquarters of U.S. diplomatic missions, they often house a variety of federal agencies such as the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Consular services, however -- which can be at an embassy or in a separate building -- are available to American citizens in case of such emergencies as a lost passport.

As a result, Americans abroad get to know U.S. embassies and consulates only if they get into trouble, which is a pity. Some, like the Hotel de Talleyrand, are exceptional enough to warrant a visit.

The State Department keeps a register of culturally significant properties, including Winfield House, an ambassadorial residence near London’s Regent’s Park, surrounded by a 12-acre garden. It was built in 1936 by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who sold it to the U.S. government after World War II for $1.

A changing world

ALSO on the register are the Palazzo Margherita, a U.S. Embassy office building on the Via Veneto in Rome, atop an archeological trove of 2,000-year-old Roman Imperial frescoes; the French colonial ambassador’s handsome residence in Hanoi; Schoenborn Palace in Prague, Czech Republic, with a Baroque facade and interior features from the Renaissance; and the American Legation at Tangier, Morocco, the first U.S. government property acquired abroad, a gift from sultan Moulay Suliman in 1821. Unlike other entries on the register, the Tangier Legation is a museum that can be visited.

Other noteworthy properties are more recent. In “Building Diplomacy: The Architecture of American Embassies,” author Elizabeth Gill Lui identifies the 1950s as another time of accelerated embassy construction. Many facilities from that era, like the Athens embassy, designed by Walter Gropius, were built by modern architectural masters as symbols of democratic openness. In the busy hearts of foreign cities, they had plenty of windows and relatively easy access but little concern for security. “The architecture of embassies reflects our changing relationship with the outside world,” Lui said in a recent telephone interview.

That relationship turned ugly with the 1965 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam. “The political shock was that an absolutely fundamental principle of international order -- the mutually agreed upon inviolability of diplomats and their missions operating in host countries -- was violated,” Charles Hill, a diplomat and fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said in an e-mail. Subsequent attacks on American diplomatic facilities -- in Tehran; Beirut; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Nairobi, Kenya -- ultimately resulted in the current rush to build new, more secure embassies. Since 2001, when Williams was put in charge of the program, the Overseas Buildings Operations bureau has cut costs and construction time, chiefly because of the introduction of a standard embassy design.

Sized, like the three bears -- small, medium and large -- the design template de-emphasizes architectural singularity. Instead, security is optimized, with such features as perimeter walls, guard booths, bulletproof windows and doors, leeway separating the building from the street, anti-ram barriers and sites at a distance from congested city centers.

Though the State Department intends to customize its new standard-design embassies to their settings -- for instance, the Armenian embassy is on a lake reflecting Mt. Ararat (actually in neighboring Turkey) thought to be the biblical landing place of Noah’s Ark -- critics have called them bunkers, reflections of fear, not the free and open values of American democracy.

At the very least, post-9/11 requirements for secure embassy buildings make it harder for the State Department to maintain historic landmarks like the Hotel de Talleyrand. The choice of new building sites outside city centers signals the abandonment of storied embassy districts. And it’s unknown whether access to consular services may become, in certain cases, more difficult for American travelers in trouble.

“What the average American tourist needs to know,” said diplomat Hill, “is that the American government is not responsible for these difficulties. It is the rise of terrorist movements, which have set themselves monstrously against the basic foundations of international order, law and established diplomatic practice.”

The recent relocation of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, from a landmark palazzo downtown to a new building 45 minutes outside the city illustrates the increasingly conflicted claims on American diplomatic missions abroad.

The former consulate, known as the Palazzo Corpi, in the busy Beyoglu district, was completed around 1882. It was then purchased for use as an embassy by Ambassador John G.A. Leishman, who assumed that the government would ultimately reimburse him. But Congress was in a stingy mood, so back in Washington, D.C., Leishman staked the building in a poker game with a handful of influential lawmakers, who promised to see that the ambassador was repaid for the property if he won. The Palazzo Corpi has the distinction of being the only U.S. Embassy acquired by the government at a card table.

But the building’s vulnerable architecture and location fated it for replacement, and in 2003 the consulate moved to a new building so impregnable that it has been likened to a maximum-security prison. Just a few months later, a terrorist bomb hit the British consulate and London-based HSBC bank, near the Palazzo Corpi in central Istanbul, killing 32 people, including Britain’s consul general, Roger Short. One of the suspected perpetrators arrested after the bombing reportedly told investigators that his group would have targeted the American consulate had it not moved to a more secure facility.

In these highly charged times, balancing security requirements with access, cultural exchange and the promotion of American values so vital to effective diplomacy is the great challenge of the State Department’s embassy building program. “We can’t do our work in a fortress,” said Ambassador Evans. “But in Yerevan [Armenia], we’ve got the balance right.”

Mixing business, comfort

THE new American embassy in Yerevan, Armenia’s mountain-bordered capital, is nothing like a bunker, said Evan. It’s a five-minute drive from Yerevan’s central square, and the building, completed earlier this year, is surrounded by lakefront and three perimeter walls, providing protection to 70 Americans, as well as 328 Armenians who work there. “But once you’re inside, it’s like a college campus, with lawns and trees and more space for receiving guests,” said Evans. The waiting area for visa applicants and U.S. citizens in need of consular services is more comfortable, he said, and the embassy’s library is open to the public.

Seemingly successful applications of the secure embassy design are hopeful signs, even if their out-of-town locations speak volumes about America’s response to the changing world. “When we build, they will come,” Williams said by e-mail, referring to his belief that embassy construction outside city centers would stimulate development.

At the very least, it’s a safe bet we won’t be buying new property on the Place de la Concorde, which is why, here in Paris, I keep walking by to admire the Hotel de Talleyrand. Keeping diplomats and foreign service workers safe comes first, of course. I just hope the illustrious old building will never be deemed too insecure to serve as a part of the U.S. Embassy to France. Every time I pass it, I feel proud to be an American.

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Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.