Less ‘timidness’, more confidence: What our newest embassy buildings tell the world
What image should Australia’s embassies project to the world? Our recently lauded consulate in Washington DC, together with those in Jakarta and Bangkok, provide some clues.
By Luke Slattery
The interior of Australia’s Washington, DC embassy was praised by judges for its “casualness”.Credit: Joe Fletcher
On the eventful evening of November 6, as the world braced for the white-knuckle ride of another Trump presidency, Melbourne-based architect Kristen Whittle was in a sanguine mood. The designer of Australia’s embassy in Washington, which last month celebrated its first birthday, was thinking not of the many challenges ahead but of the confidence with which Australia should approach them.
An embassy abroad is a calling card, a beachhead, a nation’s home away from home. It’s a projection of the national interest and a telling of the national story – or strands of it. Australia’s award-winning embassy in the US capital is more than an architectural Akubra hat or a simulacrum of a shrimp on an outsized barbie. It’s a dramatic yet subtle expression of the Australian landscape and character and, in Whittle’s words, “an evolution from the embassy architecture of the past, which expressed subservience. It says something about our evolving relationship with Washington, which is more of a relationship between equals.”
Unknown to Whittle, his work on the embassy was about to be celebrated at the architecture profession’s Logies: the Australian Institute of Architects’ (AIA) annual awards. The following night, at a function in Adelaide, his Washington embassy reeled in the Jørn Utzon Award for International Architecture. A jury of Whittle’s peers declared the building, on a prime piece of DC real estate – Embassy Row, Scott Circle – as a “celebration of the laconic traits we find so culturally important to us; an approachability, a uniqueness and an invitation for inclusivity.”
The award, in formal terms, went to Whittle’s former architectural practice, Bates Smart, although he’s acknowledged as the embassy’s design director. It was built in collaboration with Washington-based architects KCCT.
One of Australia’s oldest architecture firms, Bates Smart has been operating continuously for more than 170 years and is strongly associated with its home base of Melbourne. In the postwar years it keenly embraced architecture’s modernist international style, which made it a natural choice to design the 1960s-era Washington embassy – the precursor to today’s building. The firm was then known as Bates Smart & McCutcheon, and its principal partner, Osborn McCutcheon, led the design team. Yet the opportunity to build on such a sensitive site, a few blocks away from, and in plain sight of, the White House, produced an austere, cage-like structure clad in off-white Tennessee marble. It seemed to bland, rather than blend, into the institutional cityscape.
The exterior’s timber battening and copper cladding reflect its Australian character.Credit: Joe Fletcher
When the same firm, now shortened to Bates Smart, competed to rebuild the embassy after it began to deteriorate, its Melbourne design team was led by Whittle, who now runs his own practice, Studio Kristen Whittle. He felt they needed to create a building that was Australian through and through, not just an international building decorated with Australiana. Its Australianness, for want of a better word, should extend beyond the works by Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and John Perceval hanging on its walls. It should be reflected in the materials – copper cladding, and Queensland spotted gum linings – and the experience of light. “The old building showed deference and a level of compliance and timidness, of an Australia that was falling in line and being quiet, sticking to instructions and arguably lacking the confidence to speak out and have a voice and have an opinion,” Whittle tells me. “A country with no expression.”
At its November 7 awards in Adelaide, the architects’ jury noted the embassy’s timber battening, “a treatment of light uniquely Australian in character”, and the “Australian casualness” of the interior “instilled in an otherwise official building of government”. Australian makers and materials “are championed with commissions of furniture, lighting and art. Indigenous artists have had their stories woven into the place with the creation of bespoke textiles and rugs”. On the same day in Singapore, the embassy was laurelled as best public building (interiors) at the World Architecture Festival, the judges describing it as a symbol of Australia’s “welcoming nature”.
In an age when relations between nations are unnervingly tenuous and delicately poised, the work of international diplomacy carries a heavy burden. If the cut of a nation’s embassy signals the seriousness of its diplomatic mission, then Australia is well poised. Most are faceless – institutional buildings with a flag flying behind a fence. But a new suite of Australian embassies mine the same seam as Whittle’s in Washington: avoiding the heaviness of symbolism or jingoism, they instead project, in different ways, an endearing Australian character.
The embassy in Jakarta, the capital of Australia’s nearest Asian neighbour, is our largest diplomatic mission measured by staff numbers, and rebuilding after the terrorist attack of 2004 – when a delivery van pulled up outside the gates and a jihadist inside detonated a one-tonne suicide bomb – was a chance for national self-expression too good to miss. The Melbourne-based global practice Denton Corker Marshall (DCM) – designer of the Beijing and Tokyo embassies – saw this as an opportunity to say something about contemporary Australian culture. “This was to be the most secure embassy ever built by an Australian government,” DCM senior director Wojciech Pluta tells Good Weekend of the compound, constructed on a new and much larger plot of land than its predecessor. “At the same time, it was to be as open and friendly as possible.” A difficult balance, but one the design appears to have struck.
The Australian embassy in Jakarta, rebuilt after a 2004 terrorist bomb attack, had to balance security and openness.Credit: John Gollings
A modern embassy is a multipurpose polis, a mash-up of several building types. It typically includes an ambassadorial residence that is at once a private dwelling and retreat, and a public reception and function space. Day-to-day ambassadorial business goes on in the chancery, an office building open to the public for consular and visa services. An embassy in a less than secure capital typically includes accommodation for embassy staff – and voila, an embassy begins to look like a feudal castle.
The Jakarta embassy includes a residential neighbourhood for staff, recreational and medical services. By far the dominant structure is the chancery, designed for staff from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and 13 other government departments and agencies. A collection of 12 interlinked vertical blocks, or billets, the chancery is clad in various Australian metals: brass, copper, zinc, steel, aluminium. “The idea is that these structures evoke natural rock formations, but they also represent the richness and variety of Australian natural resources,” Pluta says. “In a broader sense they also, because of their variety and diversity, evoke our multicultural society.”
By the time the new embassy was completed in 2016, Pluta estimates he’d spent about three years in Jakarta working on the project. He was aided by DCM’s Jakarta office, which helped design secure gardens to express not the culture of Australia but that of the tropical city in which it had taken root. Four mature banyan trees were relocated to help give the compound a sense of place.
The new Australian embassy in Bangkok by BVN, another Australian architectural practice with global reach, is a variation on the theme of national self-expression in built form. “The building represents an intention to engage thoughtfully with Thailand, not as a dominating presence but one that fosters a dialogue with its host country,” BVN practice director Asher Galvin tells Good Weekend.
The Australian embassy in Bangkok blends Australian and Thai references.Credit: John Gollings
The most obvious solution to the ideal of “blending” cultures was found in the choice of brickwork for the chancery’s stout, five-storey facade. Though Australian-made, the bricks were designed in honour of the traditional Thai sun-dried earth bricks that lend warmth and character to so many Buddhist temples.
At the same time, as Galvin explains, the vibrant ochre-red brickwork evokes the Australian red centre. “We reflected frequently on the geomorphology of Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Watarrka [Kings Canyon], as well as Australia’s heavily eroded sandstone and granite landscapes. We wanted the building to have something of the organic nature, the material density, of our ancient continent.” The organic theme threads through to the interior, where the floors are made of Pilbara marble and honey-coloured blackbutt.
The result is a reminder of something essential about good architecture. Says Galvin: “When I take people through the building, they often say that it ‘seems Australian’. What’s an Australian building in a country with such a diverse building culture? It’s an open question.”
It’s one for which the AIA, by awarding its big international gong to Bates Smart, has ventured an answer, describing the new embassy in Washington as “a confident and considered statement of our place on the international stage”. As the embassy’s design director Whittle says: “The building is a haven for Australians in the US. It’s indeed ‘different’ to other buildings in Washington. It stands out and celebrates the magic of Australia through the palpable feeling of the Australian landscape.”
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