Responding to the building’s diplomatic role, SOM created a space that is both welcoming and respectful of local traditions. To mitigate its scale, and create a light aesthetic, the complex was broken up into “neighborhoods” based on functional requirements. Simple architectural geometries, coupled with gardens and courtyards, symbolically fuse eastern and western traditions.

Project Facts

Completion Year: 2008
Site Area: 10 acres
Project Area: 500,000 ft²
Building Height: 45 m
Number of Stories: 8

Project Awards

2009 • AIA - San Francisco Chapter • Excellence in Architecture: Citation Award
2009 • Architectural Record • Good Design Is Good Business China Awards: Best Public Project

At 500,000 square feet, the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing is the second largest Embassy compound ever undertaken by the United States government. Located on a ten-acre site northeast of the Forbidden City in Beijing’s new Third Embassy District, the new Embassy is a multi-building campus punctuated by gardens and art. The design emphasizes environmental sustainability and presents an open, gracious and civic face to the city of Beijing. Over 700 Embassy personnel are accommodated within a secure and socially engaging workplace.

The Embassy is organized into three “neighborhoods”: a social neighborhood with community serving and recreation spaces, a professional neighborhood with office space, and the Consular neighborhood. The Embassy’s Consular Pavilion serves as America’s front door to China. Chinese visa applicants cross a lotus garden pond on a stone-framed wooden bridge, arriving at a generous portico—an American front porch.

An ethos of sustainable design underlies the overall Embassy design. The Consular Pavilion directly conveys America’s commitment to global sustainability to the Chinese public. The Pavilion uses thermal mass to minimize peak energy demand, resting within one of the lotus ponds which hold and purify storm water. The Pavilion’s luminous roof floods its interior spaces with natural light through a set of baffled skylights. The generous use of natural light defines the public and employee interior spaces throughout the Embassy.

The largest of the buildings, at eight stories high, is perhaps the most innovative of the Embassy’s structures. A scrim of transparent, translucent and opaque glass wraps the building as a veil. The qualities of this glass veil transform as the quality of light changes throughout the day. It appears as a luminous tapestry during the day, while at night the entire structure becomes a softly glowing lantern.