A bit of suburbia grows in Baghdad

The location of the new U.S. embassy in Iraq is no secret. It's pretty difficult to camouflage 104 acres in the middle of Baghdad -- particularly 104 acres over which canary-yellow construction cranes have been hovering for months. And thanks to reports from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and various news outlets, we know the embassy compound on the west bank of the Tigris River will cost $592 million and include 27 buildings behind a series of protective walls. We know it's due to be finished by the end of the summer.

But since the U.S. government has declined for security reasons to name the embassy architects or release any plans, we haven't had any sense of what it's going to look like -- or what its design might say about the nature of the American presence in the Iraqi capital.

Then, late last month, an editor and writer named Tom Engelhardt discovered nearly a dozen computer-generated renderings of the embassy on the website of a Kansas City, Mo., architecture firm called Berger Devine Yaeger. Engelhardt posted a story on his online journal, Tom Dispatch, that linked to the BDY site. State Department officials responded by demanding that the architects remove the renderings. BDY apparently did them one better: The firm's entire site has been offline since.

The Times has learned that the architect for the embassy building itself, known as the chancery, is the Washington, D.C., firm Sorg and Associates. (Despite the recent controversy over the BDY images, the Sorg and Associates website continues to include what appear to be renderings of that building: Two images show a white office block flanked by palm trees and shaded by silvery fabric scrims.) But BDY's designs for the rest of the compound -- the numerous ancillary buildings shown in the renderings that Engelhardt discovered -- are arguably more meaningful architecturally and politically, since they suggest how extensive a construction project the State Department has been overseeing in Iraq.

According to the text BDY ran alongside the renderings, it was hired to provide "bridging documents" that help take a project from master plan toward final design. While not entirely fleshed out, in other words, the images include enough detail to allow us to draw some architectural conclusions about the nearly finished project.