• 1 Program at: https://www.inha.fr/fr/agenda/parcourir-par-annee/annees-2004-2013/a-l-orient-du-monde (...)
• 2 “Looking eastward, building identities: The architecture of European diplomacy beyond the Mediterr (...)

1The idea of devoting one thematic section of ABE Journal to the architecture of European embassies and diplomatic buildings outside Europe was the outcome of two connected initiatives. As a guest scholar of inha (Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris) in the spring of 2013, I organized with Mercedes Volait an international workshop entitled À l’orient du monde. Diplomatie européenne et architecture par-delà les rivages de la Méditerranée (1770-1920). This meeting provided the opportunity to discuss the architectural history of French and Austrian embassies in sites ranging from Istanbul and Cairo to Montenegro, China and Japan.1 The following year, in the framework of the final conference of the network European Architecture Beyond Europe, held in Palermo, one session chaired by the two of us was also devoted to the architecture of diplomacy.2 Two of the essays included in the current issue—those on the Italian embassies in Ankara and in Kabul—were presented for the first time in that context. These experiences were inspiring in many ways, and convinced us that this field of inquiry is still very promising, open to development and with some surprising challenges.

• 3 Of course the case of historic buildings that in their later history were used as embassies, like (...)

3Architecture is usually addressed as an integral part of the construction of place. Culture turns space into place, we are told by anthropologists, and the role of architectural structures and landmarks in this process is obviously very relevant. But the paradoxical status of diplomatic buildings is that they signify a relationship, a connection between two national spaces, rather than participating in the construction of one place. By transferring a fragment of the nation beyond its physical boundaries, embassies, consulates and other officially “foreign” structures, engage in a complex, dialogic relation with the culture and the landscape of the host country. In an era like the present, dominated by migration, displacements, and the emergence of new urban divisions, many aspects of the problematic space, place and landscape of diplomacy are likely to arouse critical and historical interest. Embassies, especially when designed as such, do not (and cannot) belong entirely to their physical and cultural setting. For this reason they rarely enter the official urban and architectural history of cities and nations as such.3 The historiography of a place tends to privilege the local and the typical, while embassies are, by definition, foreign and atypical. Their being is always, at least in part, out of place—and often scarcely accessible or connected to city life—enhancing their symbolic status as semiotic and geo-political machines: all the more in the case of European embassies built “beyond Europe,” implying a degree of cultural difference between patronage and local context. In fact, many other objects of design and urbanity entering the field of interest of ABE Journal evoke, in different ways, similar dynamics of displacement and hybridity in form and meaning.

• 4 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and art history,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2, 1991, (...)
• 5 Diana Barillari, “Novecento sul Bosforo. D’Aronco e Villa Italia,” in Eleonora Mantese (ed.), Abit (...)
• 6 Mark Crinson, Empire Building. Orientalism and Victorian Architecture, London; New York, NY: Routl (...)

4How is the paradoxical condition of being simultaneously here and elsewhere communicated by embassies and consulates? If one is to resort to the old but still useful threefold distinction theorized by C. S. Peirce, these buildings, their parts, their settings, their image and state of conservation, may be seen at the same time as symbols, icons and indexes of the roles performed by their countries in the geo-political environments that surround them. Semiotic approaches to visual culture assume that the three functions co-exist and interact in creating and communicating meaning.4 No visual sign or representation embedded in society can be purely iconic or indexical, the other aspects of signification always concurring with the production and presentation of its meaning. According to Peirce, the meaning of a symbol is understood and communicated by agreement, and through a code. In many embassies, the architectural and decorative elements deployed on facades, walls and gates belong in fact to a foreign cultural tradition that should be known or decoded in order to make sense. The rusticated portal on Raimondo D’Aronco’s summer residence of the Italian mission on the Bosporus, in Tarabya5, is a somewhat isolated reminder (for those who may read it) of the Italian identity of a building, that otherwise would appear far more local and rooted in place. Iconic communication is instead a matter of resemblance. The overall layout and image of certain embassies, or parts of them, may evoke, by resemblance, other models at home, as is the case of the British embassy in Istanbul, designed by W. J. Smith in the 1840s, and directly inspired by Charles Barry’s Reform Club in London.6 The double pediment on the façade of the old French consulate in Alexandria (preceding the bombing of 1882) echoes the slightly older façade of the French palace at Istanbul, in its turn inspired by Puget’s seventeenth-century building of the Chambre de Commerce in Marseilles, so closely engaged in the activities of both.

• 7 Samuel Isenstadt, “Faith in a Better Future: Josep Lluis Sert's American Embassy in Baghdad,” Jour (...)
• 8 For a piece of journalism, written by an expert on U.S. diplomatic architecture, see Jane C. Loeff (...)

5Finally, the indexical function of these structures, what they physically and directly inscribe in the meaning of urban environments (without evoking by resemblance or symbolic reference) is probably their most striking feature, and is also a function of their extra-territorial status. Besides being symbolic representations, embassies are also territorial extensions of their respective countries. In this indexical sense—indexical, but always based on political agreements—their sheer presence or absence (in Jerusalem, for instance), their size, visibility, state of conservation, proximity to or distance from other embassies and local landmarks of power, become directly communicative of geo-political and cultural relations, frictions, balances. The new U.S. embassy in Baghdad is a far cry from the Modernist structure designed by J. L. Sert in 1955‒1962,7 and used for a very short time due to the Six Day War. It is also known as “Fortress America,” and was completed in 2009 over an area of 42 hectares (104 acres). What this building communicates to local and foreign audiences is largely (though not totally) independent from linguistic codes and similarities to other structures.8

• 9 Paolo Girardelli, “Power or leisure? Remarks on the architecture of the European summer embassies (...)

6In terms of historical precedent, and possibly a first in the architectural history of diplomacy, we can think of the Russian embassy in Constantinople (1837‒1845)9—a true fragment of neo-classical St. Petersburg displaced in the midst of an Ottoman settlement—as overwhelming with its monumental stance within the surrounding environment of wooden houses. This fragment of Russia in Constantinople, designed by Gaspare Fossati (one of the last representatives of the classicist, Swiss-Italian tradition of architects working in Russia), was mistaken for the Ottoman imperial palace by travellers arriving from the Mediterranean. It signified, by way of proportion, size and visual contrast (beyond its stylistic features, which were also relevant in a symbolic and iconic sense) Russian presence and influence in the area, enhanced by the Treaty of Edirne of 1829.

• 10 Jakob Hort, Architektur der Diplomatie. Repräsentation in europäischen Botschaftsbauten, 1800-1920 (...)
• 11 Jane C. Loeffler, Fortress America, op. cit. (note 8).

7As indexes of complex political and cultural dynamics, embassies are also topographically significant: are they in central or peripheral parts of a capital city? Outside or inside the walls of Rome? In the historic peninsula of Istanbul or across the Golden Horn, in the cosmopolitan district of Pera? How far from the Forbidden City in Beijing? Reconstructing the German embassy in Rome during the interwar period on the slopes of the Capitol Hill (on the site of the old palazzo Caffarelli, used as Prussian embassy), was a major statement about the political proximity between Hitler and Mussolini.10 For both, imperial topography and the legacy of Greco-Roman classicism meant more than any other possible cultural / symbolic asset. And, speaking of topography and location, a different range of political questions may arise from the inevitable dialectics and dynamic of integration and locality versus estrangement and segregation: often a matter of degrees and nuance in a complex spectrum, but sometimes the choice, voluntary or obliged, of one of the extremes. On the side of integration we have the Buddhist temples used as European embassies in Meiji Japan, or the Ottoman, wooden konak used as a Venetian embassy in Istanbul until 1780, when it was rebuilt in Palladian forms. At the opposite extreme there is, as already mentioned, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, where “although U.S. diplomats will technically be ‘in Iraq,’ they may as well be in Washington”.11

• 12 E.g.: Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn, London; (...)
• 13 Markus Mösslang and Torsten Riotte (eds.), The diplomats’ world: a cultural history of diplomacy, (...)
• 14 Among many: François Chaslin, The Dutch Embassy in Berlin by OMA / Rem Koolhaas, Rotterdam: NAi P (...)
• 15 For Istanbul: Tommaso Bertelè, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Constantinopoli e le sue (...)
• 16 E.g.: Mercedes Volait, Maisons de France au Caire: le remploi de grands décors mamelouks et ottoma (...)
• 17 Jane C. Loeffler, The architecture of diplomacy: building America's embassies, New York, NY: Princ (...)
• 18 For some early-modern cases, see Jacques Bottin and Donatella Calabi (eds.), Les étrangers dans la (...)

8The recent, relative growth of studies and publications devoted to these aspects of design and space may also be connected, directly or otherwise, to the so-called “aesthetic turn” in international relations,12 as well as to a broader understanding of diplomacy in its cultural and symbolic dimensions.13 The existing literature on the architectural history of embassies and consulates may be roughly categorized into three groups, depending on scope and perspective: single buildings; state policy on official seats abroad; and urban environments influenced by the space of diplomacy. Monographic studies of embassies designed by prominent Modern and Post-Modern architects constitute probably the most conspicuous area of study, with cases ranging from Le Corbusier’s project of the French embassy in Brasilia, to the new embassies sanctioning Berlin’s recovered role as a capital city.14 Some historically oriented monographs are devoted to nineteenth-century European buildings that occupied a prominent place in the history of non-Western capital cities such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Beijing, Tokyo. These studies can be the work of knowledgeable diplomats15, amateurs, photographers, and more seldom of art and architectural historians.16 Secondly, a different approach to the architecture of diplomacy, as an embodiment of the foreign policies of single states, characterizes the work of Jane C. Loeffler and other scholars who focus on the policies pursued by states and governments in the design of their buildings in foreign lands.17 Finally, urban and architectural historians have sometimes devoted attention to the role of foreign representations in the urban development of districts and parts of cities.18