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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........