Let's Not Sacrifice Embassy Safety for Art's Sake

The hand-wringing over security-oriented U.S. embassy design reveals just how removed from reality (and moral responsibility) people can get ["Breaking the Diplomatic Ties That Bind Design," Style & Arts, July 19]. As an architect of numerous recent U.S. embassies categorically disparaged in this article, of course I'd prefer that our embassies not be pushed to suburban sites -- but it is not difficult to understand how site selection has evolved to this point.

If critics such as your staff writer, Philip Kennicott, think our embassies look like fortresses now, wait until they see what happens to the structural design and size of window openings if the setback from the uncontrollable perimeter is eliminated. The large setbacks from the secured perimeter are a natural, sensible way of diminishing blast pressures, but they require a lot of real estate usually feasible only outside the central business district.

My State Department client has never given me the impression that it regards the lives of its diplomats, supporting staff and facility users as expendable, yet this is essentially what Mr. Kennicott put on the table to achieve "better" design. He also missed entirely the driving force behind the Standard Embassy Design (SED) initiative: It is a means of replacing, in as short a time as possible, scores of ill-suited, dangerous diplomatic posts with modern, safe facilities designed for today's world, with costs aligning with budgets.

By many measurements, the single-contract, design-build SED methodology employed by the State Department is an enormous success, and qualitative attacks on the designs are unfounded by scrutiny of the completed projects. Let architecture critics sign up for sitting-duck staff positions in the open, artsy cultural facilities they so wistfully write about. My bet is that the diplomatic corps will gratefully stay put in their relatively safe, new-generation embassy facilities.

-- James M. Wright

Arlington