The U.S. Embassy in the Garden City diplomatic quarter of central Cairo. Standing out of the leafy,
The U.S. Embassy in the Garden City diplomatic quarter of central Cairo. Standing out of the leafy, low-rise 19th-century enclave as a striking rather late example of the corporate brutalist style—although it is apparent that its fortress-like muscularity is as much a response to the U.S. State Department’s engineering requirements for blast resistance and radio wave impenetrability than any initial drive to explore concrete expressionism. The architect, Andre Houston of Washington D.C. firm Metcalf & Associates, authored only a handful of other public buildings, and this 1989 American Embassy addition proved to be the most high-profile commission of his career—he died in March, just a week before I visited this building.Despite his and his firm’s lack of previous practice in brutalism, the design takes what was surely even back then a challenging technical brief and accomplished something both bold and heroic in the best precedents of its tradition. Especially germane would arguably be I.M. Pei’s 1973 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, with its powerful elevation of massive, recessed-grid windows, which have here been shaded, and also likely the sheltered voids of SOM’s astonishing National Commercial Bank at Jeddah, which had just been completed when this embassy was in its design stages.While SOM’s tower at Jeddah concerned itself with climate mitigation, and only obliquely incorporated Islamic motifs into its design by way of its triangular plan and trigonometric patterning, At first glance it appears that Houston (who had earlier worked in Teheran) engaged in a clumsy and overt Orientalism here, capping his handsome tower with a silly onion-dome belvedere, in the worst habits of lazy, ethnic pastiche. However, upon closer research it appears that the octagonal mechanical penthouse was originally installed without the tented polyurethane tarp—which was presumably added later to shield sensitive surveillance and communications equipment. Thus the degree to which this commendable brutalist block has been reduced to a clumsy faux-minaret was not the original intent, but a careless afterthought. -- source link
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