From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Οn Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair stands the American exception. The capital has almost no significant buildings by the giants of mid-century American modern architecture. No Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn or Mies van der Rohe, and only traces of Breuer and Gropius. But there is one lone example and, fittingly enough, it stands for the whole United States – or it used to, anyway. Eero Saarinen’s US embassy is a landmark building, realised to the highest standards, by a top-rank American modernist, on a prominent site. Judged purely on this pedigree, it is outstanding. One would expect it to be cherished. In fact, it is distinctly unloved.
This might be about to change. In 2017 the ambassador decamped to a glossy Kieran Timberlake-designed cube in Nine Elms and, since then, the Saarinen building has been transformed by David Chipperfield Architects into a luxurious ‘suites-only’ hotel, the Chancery Rosewood, which opened last month. Perhaps this time it deserves a more diplomatic reception.
Thirty Grosvenor Square, completed in 1960, was the most extravagant project of the United States’s post-war diplomatic construction extravaganza, at a moment when American self-confidence and spending power was at its peak. The American connection to Grosvenor Square was as old as the United States itself: John Adams, the fledgling country’s first ambassador to England, later its second president, lived there. Saarinen was caught between competing impulses to respect the staid neo-Georgian setting and to firmly assert American modernity.
A distinctly British compromise was the result. The unifying device is an alternating sequence of window treatments, raised and recessed, a concertina of Portland Stone with gilded touches of Transatlantic glamour. The overall effect is too heavy to take off into the jet age. A bit more dashing is the major engineering feature, a diagonal structural waffle supporting the first floor, expressed on the outside by bared beam junctions, also gilt. Soaring above it all is an American eagle in gilded aluminium with an 11-metre wingspan, sculpted by the Polish-American artist Theodore Roszak.
Contemporary reaction was almost universally negative. The building was slammed from both directions. It was too brash and also too keen to fit in. It was overly modern, and too dependent on historical gesture. It was overbearing but not enough of a landmark. Roszak’s eagle was too big, a swooping American predator, and too small to be seen properly. The critic Ian Nairn, writing in 1964, called the embassy ‘one of the biggest disappointments’ of post-war construction: ‘over-thought, overworked, over-designed’; ‘pompous and tragic’. It was, he conceded, better than no Saarinen at all – a kinder verdict than many of his peers delivered.
‘The building in fact became a kind of lightning rod for a mild anti-Americanism,’ historian Howard Malchow writes in Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain? (2011), ‘and could represent “American vulgarity” either because it was not modern enough or because it was too modern.’ The ambiguities of Saarinen’s design let the British project their impressions of the United States on to it. Malchow provides a sampling of the contemporary critical reaction, noting its universal negativity. Arch-brutalist Peter Smithson, addressing the American readership of Architectural Forum, said: ‘[We] are puzzled why you […] should accept such frozen and pompous forms as the true expression of a generous egalitarian society.’ Pevsner called it ‘decidedly embarrassing’ in its over-eagerness to fit in with London tradition. Saarinen, who died aged 51 shortly after the embassy’s completion, said it was ‘much better than the English think – but not as good as I wished it to be’.
More cheerfully, Malchow also catalogues some of the cultural attractions offered by the embassy in its early years: free lectures and films; performances by Met Opera singers and the Cornell University Glee Club. Nairn mentions an art gallery and library. This era of openness was not to last. Security had always been part of the embassy’s design – which included a glacis running around the edge of the site as a defensive measure. But after a series of terrorist attacks against US embassies in the 1980s and ’90s, the State Department issued new guidelines for its overseas facilities. The urgency of these measures increased after 11 September 2001.
The film Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), which features Sam Neill as a demonic US ambassador, shows a car sweeping up to the front entrance of the embassy and characters bounding straight up the steps. Twenty years later, even this sulphurous depiction of the building seemed rather innocent. That side of the square was closed to traffic, and the embassy was tightly bound by bollards, fences and security pavilions.
Easily the best feature of the Chipperfield renovation of the building is the removal of all this security, including the original glacis. The building at last has a street frontage – albeit set in a rather parched stone precinct, but the assorted luxurious shops, restaurants and bars accompanying the Chancery Rosewood will hopefully fill that out in time. The removal of the glacis slightly monkeys with the proportions of the ground floor, giving it rather long legs, but that’s easy to forgive as it’s such a relief – the release of a breath London didn’t know it was holding.
We can now walk right up to the building and get a rabbit’s-eye view of Roszak’s eagle, which does have a pleasing echo of the 18th-century American naive tradition. The gutting of the interior has let Chipperfield expose more of Saarinen’s structural grid, although from the street this is a little lost in the glister and twinkle of global mega-luxury. Outside, the grid is echoed in a new porte cochère, although this too is gilt, introducing more bling – too much, really, when Saarinen had included more than enough. One comes away rubbing the eyes. But perhaps here Saarinen was ahead of his time. Given the current alterations to the White House, it won’t be long before the embassy in Battersea gets a golden makeover.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
