The winner of the architectural competition, which lasted more than a year, was the Philadelphia bureau KieranTimberlake, known for its interest in green technologies. His project is for a 2 hectare site on the south bank of the Thames, in the Nine Elms area. Currently, this territory can hardly be called developed: so far it is located halfway between the industrial zone and a full-fledged city quarter. But it was precisely this situation that allowed customers to acquire the land they needed in terms of area and build it up in accordance with the security requirements for American embassies, introduced after 2001. According to them, the building should be surrounded by a spacious buffer zone with numerous "obstacles", and this could run counter to urban planning legislation - if a more populated area of London was chosen.
Of course, the project is much better in terms of architectural quality than, for example, the new embassy complexes in Berlin and Beijing. The latter are distinguished by their bulkiness, abundance of concrete and resemblance to a prison or fortress. In London, the embassy will have glass facades protected from the heat of the sun by transparent plastic cushions. Film-based solar panels will be installed on their surface; more solid batteries will be placed on the roof. The air inside will cool and clean the winter gardens. In this case, the building will be a banal, (more or less) transparent cube, erected in the middle of a security perimeter disguised as a garden. The intricate landscaping by Lori Olin hides ditches, trenches, concrete walls with patrol paths, and more. These efforts are a reflection of the competition's stated desire to incorporate the building into the fabric of the city (rather than fencing it off with a high fence like many others). capitals). However, the vast majority of these green spaces will only be accessible through the checkpoint.
The plans to build a new embassy worried the townspeople from the very beginning: in order to recover the construction costs (budget - $ 500 million), the Americans planned to sell their old building in central London (most likely for demolition), although this is almost the only work of Ero Saarinen outside the United States. The building was saved from the threat of destruction by its timely inclusion in the list of protected architectural monuments of Great Britain (its sale in the future is inevitable, but now the buyer will not be able to significantly change its appearance or function).
Despite its prestige, only 37 workshops initially participated in the competition (all of them are from the USA, which is due to "security reasons"), and the development of the project was entrusted to only four of them: KieranTimberlake, "Pei Cobb Freed", Richard Meier and Tom Maine. According to some sources, Richard Rogers and developer and architectural connoisseur Peter Pelambo, the only British on the jury, actively advocated more original options (Rogers supported Maine), but their views were not taken into account.
It should be noted that even before the publication of the winning project, the plan for the construction of the new embassy drew criticism from both local residents and government organizations Cabe and English Heritage, the Port of London Authority and even Mayor Boris Johnson: they did not like the size (estimated height - 97 m) and the fencing off from the city of the future embassy, which will damage both the transport infrastructure and public space of the adjacent area (whatever they may be), and the views of Westminster Abbey and Parliament, which have the status of a UNESCO monument.
