We present an excerpt from the introduction to America at Home: The Architecture and Politics of the US Embassy, the new book by Cormac Murray.
Few modern buildings in Dublin capture the imagination like the US Embassy. Designed in the 1950s by a young American architect, John M. Johansen, it opened to acclaim in May of 1964. For decades after its opening the building has been a symbol of modernity and advancement, a representation of the promise of America. Featuring newly released drawings and archival photography, Cormac Murray's book explores the fascinating history and design of this iconic building,
If you stand and look at it long enough, it feels like it is moving. The sensuous curves of the concrete fins catch subtle gradations of light, even on an overcast day. Neighbouring trees and embassy flags sway in the wind. The beautiful terraces of Elgin Road, with their uniform language of red-brick, iron, granite, and slate, look static and solid in comparison to this impostor. The Irish sky reflects on the glass, each window projecting cloudy scenes like a benign screensaver. Our subject is protected and partially obscured by defensive lines of railings, walls, vegetation and vigilant security personnel. It is at once solid, fortress-like, defensive; resembling a squat Martello tower, but also fluid, dynamic and delicate; a concrete carousel.
At first, perhaps its most notable feature is its cylindrical shape. On closer inspection, it is the concrete components that make this cylinder that create intrigue: the twisted fins, balconies, scupper drains, spandrels. The sand and limestone aggregate of the concrete glitters in the sunlight. Whereas cast-in-situ concrete could make a smooth sculptural form, with bold curves and geometries, a plasticity; pre-cast concrete creates more of an assemblage of parts. The building tells you how it was built, piece by piece.
US Embassy in Dublin by David Lawless.
In the 1980s the windows were coated with a gold-laminate film for blast protection, evoking the visor of a NASA astronaut's helmet. This metaphor resonates, since during its conception, successive US administrations and the general public were fixated on outer space. While the embassy was being constructed America was struggling to overtake Russia in the Space Race. Five years after its opening Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. In 1970 a fragment of the moon would be exhibited in a perspex orb in the building’s atrium, its skin distorting reflections of the contorted concrete structure inside. Photographs show a beautiful geometric spectacle, a rock within an orb, within a cylinder.
In truth, few modern buildings in Dublin capture the imagination like the US Embassy.
The building still feels modern to this day, 60 years on. I wonder what the partially-blind Eamonn de Valera thought of it when he, an Irish president with an American passport, was the first to enter the building at the opening. Archive photographs show bewildered secretaries with minute, domestic-seeming furniture in the vast, modern atrium. This space has a theatrical atmosphere. Perhaps this atmosphere arises from the knowledge that you’re a performer in here, you’re always being watched, like in Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing circular panopticon.
The architect's claim that his circular façade design "turns its back on no one" takes a sinister quality when one thinks of it in the context of surveillance. It is not accidental that a disapproving architect in 1964 allegedly compared the building to the interior of Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. The acoustics are echoey with the hard surfaces and terrazzo floors: a civic space like the drum of the Four Courts, Dublin City Hall, or a circular church nave.
With the nature of bureaucracy moving slowly, visitors here typically are given plenty of time to take in every detail of their surroundings, furniture, fixtures, door handles. I think of the generations of young Irish people who queued up outside and inside, in hopes of getting a visa to America. Like the Statue of Liberty’s message to immigrants reaching New York, this building held a promise about travelling for opportunity overseas. I think of all the protests that organised outside in moments when it represented Western imperialism, or how it was the focus of grief and support at moments of American tragedy. It is a portal to another continent.
For decades after its opening the building has been a symbol of modernity and advancement, a representation of the Irish people’s idea of the progressiveness of America. It was one of the last avant-garde results from a programme the American government undertook to export its vision of open and free democracy to the rest of the world, by commissioning leading architects to design modern buildings. When viewed today, it harks back to a more optimistic period in American Foreign Policy. Architecture and monuments communicate the ambitions and values of political institutions for generations to follow, perhaps more lastingly than the transient aspects of policy or economics. Significant building works are obviously attractive to political leaders since they create employment and commerce, and in this particular case, can symbolically strengthen the diplomatic relationship between two nations.
The architect John Johansen was a prolific designer of modern houses who won the commission early in his career, aged 40. He was trained by two of the leading Bauhaus masters in Harvard who had emigrated from Europe to flee the Second World War. Later he became part of an elite circle of American modernist architects, including Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer and Eliot Noyes. Johansen’s constant experimentation in architecture, particularly later in his career, meant his portfolio is a varied catalogue, with un-built and built examples all consistently probing the technological and social possibilities of his era.
In a significant boost to its legacy, in 2018 the US Embassy was included in The Secretary of State’s Register of Culturally Significant Property. The register lists "diplomatic architecture and property overseas that figure prominently in our country’s [America’s] international heritage". The register describes it thus: "the design that won approval was the now familiar 'sinewy drum’ which was startling at the time, especially as an expression of the United States’ diplomacy."
In truth, few modern buildings in Dublin capture the imagination like the US Embassy. Its façade and structure of organic-shaped exposed concrete fins have no point of comparison in Dublin. The inspiration for the design is often confused or misappropriated: whether it be inspired by round towers, Martello towers, The Book of Kells, Aran jumpers, even skeletal forms. Its story demonstrates that some buildings can be a vessel for multiple (often contradictory) meanings, reasonings, or associations. As a rare instance of a building being holistically derived by propaganda purposes, it is a representation of mid-twentieth century America in mid-twentieth century Ireland.
The Architecture and Politics of the US Embassy is published by Phibsboro Press
