Kieran Timberlake Designs New US Embassy in London

Laurence Grigorov is highly influenced by modern design trends and endeavours to instil these inspirations in the company’s architectural style., who is director of Laurence Martin Developments, often looks for inspiration from international architectural design trends. This allows Laurence Grigorov to continually keep the development projects that the company is involved in, fresh and current. Laurence Martin Developments is a luxury residential development company in Johannesburg, South Africa.

A controversial new project which has caught the interest of Laurence Grigorov is the new US Embassy situated in London which is featured on www.designcurial.com

Donald Trump may have complained about it, but the new US Embassy is one of the most extraordinary projects the capital and the world of diplomacy have seen. James Timberlake, co-founder of the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake that undertook the design, proudly stated the embassy is ‘a spectacular building’ and ‘an embodiment of peace and prosperity’.

London’s previous American Embassy was bound to be a hard act to follow for its successor, wherever it would be. In 1956, Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen won the design competition for an embassy in Grosvenor Square in opulent Mayfair. This was the time when his bold curved forms were emerging to provide a futuristic counterpoint to rectilinear modernism. It opened in 1960 and the scale, materiality and disciplined geometry gave it a glamorous gravitas.

There are parallels in the story of the new embassy. Following a 2008 decision to move, it too started with an architectural competition, announced during George W Bush’s presidency. Pei Cobb Freed, Richard Meier & Partners and Thom Mayne’s practice Morphosis were the other finalists. In 2010, KieranTimberlake won with a design that, like Saarinen’s had, offered a rectilinear box floating on a glazed ground floor, rising from a defensive base.

Timberlake described the embassy building as ‘an object within its urban context’, but it’s an isolated object. Admittedly not as wide as Saarinen’s embassy, it nevertheless dwarfs it — this is essentially a 12-storey cube, 65m high; a huge volume that doubles the embassy floor area to 48,128 sq m.

This embassy may not be to everyone’s taste — but nor was Saarinen’s when it opened. There’s plenty to like about it, such as the art and the park, and not least its sustainability. It claims net carbon neutrality, and its wastewater reclamation system, solar photovoltaic array, ground source heat pump and the stormwater control capacity of the pond are among features which are expected to earn it LEED Platinum and BREEAM Outstanding ratings.

It’s clear that much of the embassy cost is down to security, and doubtless it filled many, many confidential pages of the 1,000-page brief Timberlake said his practice had to tackle.

Laurence Grigorov is highly influenced by modern design trends and endeavours to instil these inspirations in the company’s architectural style.