Picture this: It’s 1962 and the family is out for a Sunday stroll in London. The destination? The US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Some 60 years on, it may sound odd to visit an embassy for leisure rather than a lost passport.
But in the Cold War era, these American complexes in foreign lands were also public centers for art and cultural diplomacy.
Designed by some of the best American architects of the time — such as Eero Saarinen, Florence Knoll, Walter Gropius and Edward Durell Stone — the embassies were brick-and-mortar symbols of American post-war ambition and might.
Sadly, the trend didn’t last.
With the rise of terrorist bombings in the late 1990s, American embassies became barricaded and banal – with some of the most significant ultimately succumbing to the wrecking ball.
However, times are changing. Sort of. The US government’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has realized that contemporary embassies can be both secure and beautiful—if you hire the right design talent.
Like their Cold War predecessors, a new generation of renowned American architects is devising embassies that represent the steadfast values of democracy—with 21st century innovation.
And some of the best of these creatives are helping to save the modern originals, as well.
Cold War US embassies were commissioned under a campaign for architectural diplomacy. Soft power, you might say, for hard-edged times.
The State Department asked these modernist masters, some of whom fled Nazi persecution to America during World War II, to envision structures that expressed the democratic ideals of the United States—progress, creativity, equality.
Long the domain of architects and academics, the significance of Cold War embassies remain largely underappreciated by the masses, says David B. Peterson, executive director of the preservationist Onera Foundation, in New Canaan, CT.
His new book, “Embassies of the Cold War: The Architecture of Democracy, Diplomacy, and Defense,” highlights 12 of the most notable embassies from this period – from Rio de Janeiro and Oslo to Havana to Baghdad – while revealing both their historical importance and current physical condition.
“Before the end of World War II, the focus on diplomatic architecture was pretty much non-existent,” says Peterson. “After the war, we wanted to have eyes and ears in every major city. The US was the only country to build these modernist mid-century embassies. It was risky, but it was pioneering.”
The embassies’ designs were unquestionably political statements. “There was an influence against neoclassicism, which was associated with Nazism [and the Soviet Union], so the earliest Cold War embassies incorporated many of the [more Western-thinking] International Style architectural elements,” Peterson explains. “They were intended to be very inviting with three separate entrances, one for diplomatic stuff, one for the public, and one for the auditoriums and libraries.”
And the public certainly did visit. In March of 1962, for instance, culture fans swarmed the London embassy for its “Vanguard American Painting” exhibition, a display of 84 artworks by 33 American Abstract Expressionists whose work Nazi Germany had declared “degenerate” some two decades earlier.
The show, which included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, is still considered one of the genre’s most important.
The host building itself could easily have been an exhibit highlight.
Designed in 1956 by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, the US embassy in the posh Mayfair area is a six-story edifice covered in a diagrid of the same Portland stone as its neoclassical neighbors.
Though public criticism of the design was harsh at the time, the building — like London’s iconic BT Tower and Abbey Road Studios — has since been awarded Grade II protective status.
Nonetheless, it is no longer an embassy—in 2009, the US State Department sold the building to the Qatari government and in 2025, it will become a complex of shops, restaurants, and a luxury Rosewood hotel, all conceived by Pritzker Prize-winning British architect David Chipperfield.
Of Saarinen’s original design, only three walls of its screen-like façade will remain.
The fate of such buildings has become top of mind for architects called to both preserve and reimagine other Cold War embassies. “The importance of these buildings is not just the buildings themselves,” says Peterson. They preserve “a history of this country.”
In New Delhi, for instance, New York-based architects Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss, co-principals of Weiss/Manfredi, are re-envisioning the 28-acre diplomatic campus surrounding the original Edward Durell Stone-designed embassy, which was completed in 1959.
The architects are restoring the embassy “to its original elegance,” says Manfredi, which will include updates to key period elements such as breeze block ventilation, reflecting pools, and water gardens.
Owing to 21st century security demands, the temple-like structure — landmarked by the Indian government — can no longer serve as a chancery.
Still, the architects insisted to the State Department that it be preserved.
When the project is completed in fall 2027, the original embassy will be used for a low security purpose, supported by a series of new buildings to handle formal diplomatic demands.
“We created a companion building, making sure that it was no higher than the [original] embassy and set back… with a symbolic reflecting pool” that will collect rainwater during monsoon season, says Weiss. The duo is also installing a series of Mughal-inspired shade gardens surrounding the original embassy that were included in those 1954 plans but never completed.
Weiss/Manfredi’s approach balances preservation with contemporary safety and sustainability demands.
The latter is a requirement of the OBO’s 2017 “Embassy After Next” guidelines — which call for functional, resilient and cost effective facilities whose designs are optimized for “local, environmental, and cultural factors,” describes OBO director William Moser.
After the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the OBO swung its design pendulum far away from the Cold War era.
Embassies were no longer to be located in dense city centers with easy street access; instead they would be built in closed-off compounds that prioritized security.
The current embassy in Baghdad, for instance, is a 104-acre assemblage of 21 buildings, all highly fortified with small screened windows and surrounded by large walls built in 2017.
It’s a far cry from the original, designed in 1955 by Harvard Graduate School of Design dean Joseph Lluís Sert that provided a seamless relationship between interior and exterior spaces.
Following the bombings, the Standard Embassy Design system was born, which streamlined and formalized embassy development. In 2011, the system was revised to encourage “excellence” through more customized architecture — such as was built during the Cold War.
Then in 2020, former Pres. Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a return to classical architecture for all federal buildings and foreign embassies (it’s a style also favored by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin).
The order has since been rescinded by President Joe Biden.
Today’s OBO program has refocused on what makes contemporary American design great—contextual, innovative, and climate-resilient schemes that express America’s leading-nation status.
“Sustainable measures not only have a symbolic value, but…with a hotter, wetter world, these are really very significant economic drivers,” says Manfredi.
Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang agrees that “eco-diplomacy” is now a State Department priority. The Studio Gang principal is designing an entirely new US Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil on the site of the old two-story chancery dating back to 1962.
Although the existing historic structure “couldn’t be reused,” Gang’s new embassy preserves a midcentury landscaped courtyard featuring fountains and reflecting pool by Brazilian modernist designer Roberto Burle Marx. A series of new buildings complete Gang’s embassy complex, which is slated to be finished in 2028.
When a building is in salvageable shape, “the most sustainable thing to do is to reuse landmark pieces of architecture,” says Annum Architects principal Philip Chen.
In Athens, his Boston-based firm is rehabilitating the 1956-designed US Embassy by Bauhaus-founder and MetLife building architect Walter Gropius.
Chen’s team is expanding the embassy by 65,000 square feet in order to accommodate contemporary diplomatic functions.
The original colonnaded facility was constructed with the same Pentelic marble as the Parthenon but its glass walls led to easy Soviet spying.
Chen’s team is sheathing it in a new curtain wall that upgrades security but feels historically sensitive.
“I like to think of [the Cold War era] as a golden age of diplomatic architecture,” says Chen. “It was very important for us to preserve those ideas of openness as much as possible.” Peterson agrees that “security doesn’t have to exclude design.”
Unfortunately, not every architect gets it right. Since 2018, the US Embassy in London has been housed 1.5 miles away from its original Grosvenor Square home in a new $1 billion building designed by Philadelphia-based architecture firm KieranTimberlake.
The embassy’s ice cube-like façade may be blast-proof, but its monolith form bears little of the geometric elegance of Saarinen’s original.
Striking a balance between design that both reflects the US and the host nation remains as challenging today as it was in the 1950s. “The big debate is: Do you bring American architecture to another country, or do you simply mimic the country’s architecture?” asks Weiss. “It’s neither. There is a larger opportunity to create something that’s truly both fitting of its place, but fitting to the aspirations [of America].”
Indeed, that’s what made so many mid-century embassies so remarkable – their ability to use architectural advocacy to represent the best of both the US and their host nations. “There’s nothing like walking into a physical structure to inspire a feeling,” says Peterson. “And that’s essentially what those embassies were built to do.”
Elizabeth Fazzare is a former editor at Architectural Digest