KIERAN TIMBERLAKE TO DESIGN US EMBASSY IN LONDON
The Philadelphia architecture firm Kieran Timberlake has been selected to design the new United States Embassy in London, the State Department announced on Tuesday, according to the New York Times.
The one-billion-dollar project, scheduled to be complete in five years, will relocate the embassy to a site of nearly five acres in a light-industrial area south of the Thames River that is slated for commercial and residential development; for the past fifty years, it has been in a modernist building designed by Eero Saarinen at Grosvenor Square.
Kieran Timberlake’s embassy calls for a boxy glass structure, sheathed in pillowlike panels of high-tech plastic. The site features environmentally conscious grassy areas and a pond. The firm was chosen after a yearlong competition that included Richard Meier & Partners and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York and Morphosis Architects of Los Angeles.
