Architecture As Diplomacy (Er, Not Really)

Berlin’s newly-christened $143-million American embassy, “designed by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, is something of an anti-monument — a five-story, low-slung, sandstone-colored palimpsest on which is inscribed the complicated history of urbanism in Berlin, the troubled state of U.S. embassy design and the pitfalls of slavishly contextual architecture.”