JOURNAL/ Australian Embassy/2017

Bates Smart Director Kristen Whittle explains:

“Our approach for creating a ‘uniquely Australian’ experience was to analyse and abstract qualities of the extraordinary landscape across the country. The beguiling colour, especially the earthy and russet tones of the desert, the strong horizon line and expanse of skies that characterises many of our distinct panoramas and the distinct clear bright light of our natural environment.”

The exterior of the building embodies these ideas both through its materiality and form. The unique and distinctive folded façade is a combination of treated copper and glass which cast an array of soft shadows across the building. The colouration of the metal, with its reddish tonality creates beauty and warmth and is evocative of desert landscapes. The glass emphasises the importance of light and creates a sense of openness throughout. The building addresses the prominent Washington roundabout, Scott Circle, and the façade responds directly to the changing line of approach this context provides. From the north, a greater extent of the metal façade is presented, reflecting the solidity and red brick language of the surrounding 16th Street neighbourhood. To the south, the façade opens up with a greater extent of glass, maximising the views towards the White House and generating a more civic appearance to the building. The combination of the folded façade and a changing line of approach creates a dynamism that responds to the Washington context, whilst creating a distinctive and memorable architectural response.

The ground floor is presented as a generous and welcoming two-storey exhibition space. The extensive use of clear glass enables visitors to view the collection of Australian art and any accompanying exhibitions before entering the building.

The surrounding gardens slope upwards from the streetscape towards the exhibition spaces to create an immersive landscape setting. Street facing outdoor courtyards punctuate the landscape providing additional focal outdoor areas for art and exhibitions.

Security requirements have been seamlessly integrated into both the building and landscape design to ensure that an open and inviting environment is experienced. Sustainable design features include a green roof with an extensive photovoltaic array, a high performance thermally efficient façade, zoned air conditioning with heat recovery, and water capture and reuse.

Bates Smart Studio Director Mark Healey comments:

“At the heart of the building a generous glass veiled atrium distributes natural light to both the workplace and the symbolic representational areas on the ground floor. The diversity of daylight and open space throughout the building reflects the intrinsic importance of light and scale in the Australian psyche, whilst also providing a positive environment for staff wellbeing.”

Located directly adjacent to the core, a feature timber staircase connects all workplace levels and links a series of communal platforms within the secure staff area. These spaces face onto the central public atrium and provide informal meeting spaces, promoting interconnectivity between agencies, breaking down historic silos and providing a genuinely enjoyable place to work. The large, modular floor plates provide a highly adaptable future-focused solution for the Chancery, which will allow for dynamic change within all agencies.

The materiality of the interior is refined and timeless - a palette of timber, concrete and glass contributes to the sense of informality throughout. This distilled assemblage is complemented with bespoke textile, furniture, lighting and industrial design, all selected from the best of Australia’s design industry.

Importantly, innovative sustainability solutions and wellness considerations are integral to the design of the new Chancery. A flexible adaptable workplace strategy provides a variety of work settings, which combined with thoughtful daylighting design has resulted in work spaces that are sustainably designed and that promote health and wellbeing.

In addressing the design for the new Embassy we carefully investigated the urban context. We wanted to provide a strong and uniquely Australian approach, whilst continuing to be sympathetic to the Washington context.

The Embassy is located in the north-west quadrant of Scott Circle, and this slightly off-centre position impacted how we approached the design. Unlike other buildings facing Scott Circle, the existing Embassy is setback from the title boundary. This approach weakened the urban coherence of Scott Circle. We decided that by reinstating a building of similar scale and form to the street frontage, we would reinforce the urban character of the city.

We noticed a distinct shift in the building grain along the N Street, which runs east-west and intersects at Scott Circle. To the south civic-scale large grain civic buildings dominate, whilst to the north a finer residential grain emerges. This change in building scale also results in a shift in materiality. Buildings south are mostly constructed in marble, glass and metal for contemporary buildings, whilst buildings north are more domestic and characterised by the use of brick.

We were also interested in the different approaches to the building. Sweeping angles from the Scott Circle roundabout and oblique approaches along the diagonal Massachusetts Avenue, provided opportunities for the building to transform in appearance depending on the direction of travel. This allowed us to tune the building to its context.

Overlaid with the urban context we were interested in exploring Australian character through interpreting our unique landscape. We wanted to explore natural lines and shifts in patterns across the façade, rather than the symmetrical and formal straight lines of the classical period. While ideas of freedom, democracy and the expanse of space are conveyed through the use of glass and transparency.

The transitioning folded copper and glass façade responds uniquely to all these contextual frameworks.

We have designed the new Embassy so that in line with the civic buildings to the south the building will appear open and crisp, culminating with a clean ‘vertical’ horizon edge at the prominent south-east corner. Whilst when approaching from the north the building will appear more solid, responding to the mass of the adjacent masonry church and the neighbouring domestic brick architecture of 16th Street.

As you move around the building, the façade transforms from one condition to another, providing a unique and memorable experience, whilst also respecting the scale, massing and street alignment of the other buildings anchoring Scott Circle.

The landscape strategy presents a vibrant green environment around the base of the building, providing an outlook for staff and visitors, whilst also contributing to the greater public realm. As Australian flora would not survive in Washington’s climate, a local based landscape strategy will be adopted, interspersed with Australian stone-paved external exhibition spaces.

Practical zoning has located the loading and carpark access to the western laneway, a generous pedestrian forecourt directly to the south of the main entrance, and a separate vehicular set down south-west of the site. The eastern frontage at 16th Street has integrated standoff distances and anti-ram walls within the landscape setting, whilst also providing pedestrians vistas to the internal galleries and outdoor exhibition spaces.

Security overlays, fundamental to the planning have been integrated seamlessly, providing an outwardly welcoming environment.

The layout of the building is clear, simple and flexible, and incorporates the latest in sustainable design and workplace thinking. Careful consideration and a distillation of thought has led to an innovative built outcome that solves a complex brief, and provides a clear unified solution that is intertwined with a poetic undercurrent celebrating the human condition.

Architecture should not be viewed as simply a physical functional construct, rather it should be approached as chambers of experience that support and nourish our daily lives and invigorate our imagination. With the design of the Australian Embassy we have sought to engage the human condition, our diversity of senses, our desire for community and places for reflection. The Embassy explores connections to landscape and to the sky above, connections to place and to one another.

As Juhani Pallassma states in ‘Understanding Architecture’, “Our experience is both the most important and the most appropriate means of evaluating architecture.”

The atrium effectively increases the daylight perimeter of the building by an impressive 40%, with 70% of the resulting workspaces located within 6m of natural light.

The introduction of natural light within the workplace is vital in supporting staff wellbeing, whilst also aligning with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum sustainable initiatives.

The design of the workplace is humanised, yet rational. The community hub and the inter-connecting staircase upon arrival enables inter-departmental collaboration, whilst respecting the differing security levels.

The hub is a warm, sun-bathed, voluminous space adjacent to the atrium and provides an activated face to the workspace.

Once within the secure envelope, the side-core floorplate provides a flexible, scalable and contiguous workspace wrapped around the central atrium. This space will accommodate the Embassy’s diverse needs now and into the future.

The workplace will be the largest single component of the building, representing approximately 55% of the total Embassy area.

Our deep experience in workplace design ensures the building will be flexible for future growth and ongoing developments in technology.

Since then our practice has never been far away from the poignant moments that have shaped our nation.

Indeed, it was some 52 years ago when we were appointed as architects for this very same project, the Australian Embassy in Washington.

This was a building commissioned by the government of Sir Robert Menzies and developed during the Harold Holt era and finally opened by Prime Minister Sir John Gorton.

At last year’s annual Bates Smart cocktail party, we discussed the design of this project with our fellow past director, Robert Dunster, who had served as project architect in Washington during the delivery stages of the project under Sir Osborn McCutcheon, design director at Bates Smart.

It was of great interest to learn during this conversation that Sir Osborn had been bypassing known protocols and leading this project directly with the then Prime Ministers Holt and Gorton, much to the chagrin of DFAT.

It’s worth saying at this point, and to avoid the annoyance of the wonderful Kevin Nixon and his team at DFAT, that we have no intentions of breaking rank this time round and indeed it is fair to say that we have been greatly pleased to be working with such a buoyant and thoughtful team at DFAT.

We were also fortunate to have another wonderful occurrence happen to us during the competition phase of this great project - when we unearthed in our library the official book of the opening of the current embassy, which bore essays by Richard Nixon and Sir John Gorton.

There was talk in both essays about this new handsome building contributing to the attractiveness of Washington and being a tangible sign of the vitality and permanence of the Australian-American relationship.

These texts certainly pressed home the significance, tone, symbolism and gravitas of this commission.

As designers, the weight and importance of this symbolism requires us to reflect on our creativity and to ensure that is coming from a place of hope, honesty, reflection, vitality and meaning.

And for us, this meant coming back to encapsulating the experiences of Australia, to the extraordinary landscape and the beguiling colour and form of the land.

These natural qualities that we were drawn to are arguably most exemplified by the clear and expansive horizon we see in Australia, that delivers the sharp almost pristine light that supports the abundant sense of life of this great continent. It was this character that we found embodied the virtues of hope and friendship so critical for this new embassy.

And so it is these accents, these experiences that are deeply embedded into our design for the new building, both inside and out. They symbolise the presence of Australia in Washington.

The building is about a proud Australia, an open Australia and an Australia with strong character, resilience, wit, charm, endurance and beauty.

Now the hard work of delivering this project can begin and we would like to thank again the Australian Government and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for awarding Bates Smart this prestigious commission. A commission that is of the upmost importance to our practice, and we are here today to assert our commitment to you and to this project and to ensure that a most powerful and compelling outcome is delivered.”

After great controversy, it was decided that a new building would be designed rather than restoring the original design. Bates Smart was appointed to design the new hall which was completed in 1956. Designed by Sir Osborn McCutcheon, the new hall was completed under the supervision of the firm's emerging young star, architect Robert Dunster. The renowned Australian sculptor Tom Bass was also engaged and provided the copper mural relief over the entry tilted ‘Trials of Socrates’.

In the 1960s the trio of McCutcheon, Dunster and Bass came together for the design and construction of the Australian Embassy in Washington. McCutcheon as designer, Dunster as the on-site project architect and Bass providing the sculptural bronze coat of arms.

Melbourne Studio Director Tim Leslie sat down with Robert Dunster to reflect on some of the firm’s history and the design of the 1969 Australian Embassy in Washington D.C.

Read the full article here.

Peter Smithson worked as an architect at Bates Smart in the late 1970s and assisted Robert Dunster on Collins Place (1970-80). Coincidently, Robert Dunster was the project architect for the original Bates Smart designed Australian Embassy, built in Washington 1969.

Copper is a durable metal, more resistant to corrosion than many other metals.

Different colours appear on the surface of the copper when heated due to the process of thin-film interference. This is a natural occurring phenomenon that arises due to the reflection of light waves. Heat causes a build-up of natural transparent oxide on the surface of the copper. The greater the heat, the thicker the layer, and it is this process that results in diverse spectrum of colours, from blues to reds.

In addition to the differences in appearance created by heat, coating the copper with benzotriazole, assists in preventing some forms of corrosion, but also effects the colours in the metal.

We are still in the process of investigating the different colours and properties of copper and how they will be used to create a unique façade for the Embassy.

Bates Smart also provided design briefings of the competition winning scheme to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and associated agencies based in Canberra as well as the Australian Embassy post in Washington DC.

Importantly, early consultation with the US State Department, District Department of Transport, and Office of Planning were warmly received in Washington DC.

Joe Hockey commented “The new Australian Embassy will be a new DC landmark. Stunning modern design by Bates Smart.” (Twitter)

Julie Bishop MP commented “New Australian Embassy in Washington designed by Bates Smart… an innovative replacement for a … 50 year old building.” (Facebook)

Both essays talk about this new handsome building contributing to the attractiveness of Washington and being a tangible sign of the vitality and permanence of the Australian-American relationship. These texts pressed home the significance, tone, symbolism and gravitas of this commission.

View this fascinating commemorative book here

The incorporation of artwork within the 1960s Australian Embassy was initiated by then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, who wanted the design to extend beyond the functional requirements of a chancery.

Bass was commissioned to create a free-standing bronze sculpture depicting Australia’s coat of arms, which was to be located in the forecourt of the building.

The work is a notable example of Australian modernist sculpture of the 1960s and a significant public artwork. The sculpture provides a lineage to the past, not only for Bates Smart, but also for the Australian public.

The artwork will be relocated within the new embassy when it is finished.