In the mid-20th century, after the United States emerged triumphantly from World War II, the State Department launched an ambitious architecture program for new U.S. embassies that expressed the nation’s forward-looking role on the world stage. Leading American architects were tapped for these commissions, including Eero Saarinen, who designed the chancery on Grosvenor Square in London; Edward Durell Stone, who created what may be his finest work in New Delhi; and Richard Neutra, who built the embassy in Karachi, Pakistan. Other architects in the program included Walter Gropius (Athens), John Johansen (Dublin), Marcel Breuer (the Hague) and Jose Luis Sert, whose elegant mission in Baghdad was decommissioned; a new embassy complex was eventually built in 2007—a massive $750 million fortified compound on 104 acres designed by the Kansas City firm Berger Devine Yaeger. It is the largest embassy in the world.
As the century wore on, State Department buildings were often more utilitarian than innovative, and security concerns became paramount. The attacks on U.S. properties abroad, particularly the simultaneous 1998 suicide truck bombings of the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed more than 200 people, had demonstrated the new dangers of diplomacy. After 9/11, security demands became even more urgent.
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