Embassy of the United States of America, Ottawa. Skidmore Owings and Merrill,Washington, DC. above:: official ‘front’. below: Sussex Drive, the ‘back’.
losing my religion Myron Nebozuk
E very couple of weeks I get together for sushi with a good friend who is both a newly minted grandfather and practicing Muslim. Our conversations run the gamut from little kids through to geopolitical events. At one of our lunch dates last fall, as we were quietly marvelling at the miniature cumulus formations in our miso soups, he announced that he was giving up religion. ‘Why?’ I asked, trying to mask my surprise. ‘The religious values that shaped me as a child are now strangely at odds with the values of those who profess to belong to the same religion’. This vignette serves as a springboard to illustrate a much larger scale dichotomy between the American government and its citizenry. This dichotomy also exists, perhaps at an unintentional level, in the current United States Embassy in Ottawa. Several critiques have thoroughly analyzed the embassy’s uneasy relationship to its immediate physical context, typically concluding that the embassy’s two face-edness is a measured response to two physically different contextual conditions. Rather than covering old ground, I will instead speculate about the forces that shaped this building from a larger cultural and political perspective.
I propose that the American Embassy is not so much a response to its physical environment but rather an embodiment of two diametrically opposed belief systems, operating independently from each other. Both are intrinsic to America’s identity. Is this building Fort Knox with a happy face? Like the unexpected announcement during miso, this query illustrates a fundamental divide between governing bodies and their followers, be they religious or political. The collective shock that we all felt on September 11th, becomes something more complicated when we re-consider the Embassy in the context of September 11th. It’s as if the events of that day were presaged in the defensive gestures implemented by the embassy’s architects.
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ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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