From Pax America to American exceptionalism, American security and beyond: U.S. Legation building in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Architecture’s ability to not only define a city’s identity but also to convey the values and aspirations of its builders continues to be its most lasting legacy. Great civic architecture, which has endured throughout the ages, becomes cultural property, which is codified for protection as “World Heritage Sites.” This article presents the challenges and the opportunities of designing a new U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil and a World Heritage Site. Built in 1960, the current embassy was designed to convey collaboration with the USA and its host country by following the planners’ modernist design vision. The new embassy will have to be designed for counterterrorism, convey democratic ideals, and not undermine the cultural property value of the World Heritage Site. Through an examination of the Department of State’s history of legation building, the paper concludes by proposing ways that respond to the cultural diversity in Brasilia.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural property
• world heritage
• architectural design
• American diplomacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, ‘Pax America’ refers to the period of peace and empire building by the United States after the First World War.

2. A legation building is defined in this paper as not only an embassy but also a consulate, a foreign office and an ambassador’s residence.

3. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations is an international treaty that defines diplomatic relations and codifies the longstanding custom of diplomatic immunity among nations.

4. The Porter Bill was named after U.S. Representative Stephen G. Porter (Republican from Pennsylvania) and chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

5. $10 million in 1926 is worth $156 million in 2021.

6. John W. Chandler was an expatriate American and a French-trained architect practicing in Paris. He had written to Mellon’s nephew to solicit the U.S. Embassy project.

7. In 1926, the U.S. Congress authorised nine new buildings in the Federal Triangle in Washington. Beaux Arts architects, John Russell Pope, Egerton Swartwout, Henry Bacon, and Paul Cret, built monumental buildings, inspired by the French neoclassical standard, not the nascent American one.

8. The first members of the FBO Design Review panel were Henry Shepley, Ralph Walker, and Pietro Belluschi, with Colonel Harry A. McBride, a former Foreign Service Officer, as chair.

9. The U.S. Marshall Plan was an American initiative, proposed by Secretary of State George Marshal in 1948, to provide $13 billion in foreign aid to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War.

10. The U.N. Headquarters was an amalgamated conceptual design by Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier.

11. The former U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro is now the U.S. Consulate for the city. A new consulate building, designed by Richärd Kennedy Architects, is currently being built in the downtown neighbourhood of Cidade Nova. The Department of State will continue to use the Harrison and Abramovitz building for administrative purposes. US Consulate, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2021) Docomomo. Available at: https://www.docomomo-us.org/register/us-consulate-rio-de-janeiro-brazil (Accessed: February 2, 2023).

12. The urban core of Brasilia included: The Esplanade of Ministries, health and education zones, hospitality zones, residential quarters, and the diplomatic zone.

13. The World Heritage Center has not received a management from IPHAN for Brasília in 2022. Centre, U.N.E.S.C.O.W.H. (no date) UNESCO World Heritage Centre – State of Conservation (SOC 2021) Brasilia (Brazil). Available at: https://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/4251 (Accessed: February 6, 2023).

14. The U.S. National Historic Preservation Act was amended in 1980 to include Section 402–16 U.S.C. § 470a-2, stating that “prior to the approval of any Federal undertaking outside the United States which may directly and adversely affect a property which is on the World Heritage List or on the applicable country’s equivalent of the National Register of Historic Places, the head of a Federal agency having direct or indirect jurisdiction over such undertaking on such property for purposes of avoiding or mitigating any adverse effects.

15. The Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act (SECCA, 1999) codified security features, specifically 100-foot setbacks from streets.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Hardin Kapp

Paul Hardin Kapp is Associate Professor of Architecture. He has taught historic preservation in architecture at Illinois for the past 13 years. He teaches Historic Preservation Design, Historic Building Preservation, Conservation of Building Materials, and Recording Historic Buildings. His students have placed twice in the Charles E. Peterson Prize for Measured Drawings for the Historic American Buildings Survey and they have placed twice in the Students for Classical Architecture Competition. He is the Associate Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he is a recognized lecturer at the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham, UK. Prior to his tenure at Illinois, he was a lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was also the University’s historic architect from 2002 to 2008. Professor Kapp is a Franklin Fellow with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Overseas Operations, Office of Cultural Heritage; an NEH Fellow; a Fulbright Scholar; a James Marston Fitch Midcareer Fellow; and a Charles E. Peterson Fellow. He co-edited and contributed with Paul J. Armstrong for the edited book: SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), which won the Historic Preservation Book Award from the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington and was recognized as a Choice Best Academic Book Title in 2013. He is the author of The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). His latest book, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, will be published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2022. He has also written numerous articles and book chapters focusing on historic preservation, conservation, and heritage management. Professor Kapp has been the chair of the National Council for Preservation Education and is currently the editor of Preservation Education and Research—the Journal of the National Council for Preservation Education. He also serves on the editorial board of Built Heritage. He was a reviewer for the Fulbright Commission in 2015, 2017, and 2021. He was also a reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Kapp has been an adviser to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation. He served on the National Register of Historic Places review panels in Illinois and Virginia. He continues to serve as a member of the Sustainability Committee for the Association for Preservation Technology. Professor Kapp is a licensed architect in Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. His architecture designs have received awards from the James River Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Preservation Alliance of Virginia (now part of APVA), the Association of General Contractors of East Tennessee, and the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.