Adding up to dull in Berlin

BERLIN — BARACK OBAMA is planning a visit to the German capital this month -- reportedly to deliver a major foreign-policy speech at Pariser Platz, the stately, almost perfectly proportioned plaza that has emerged since the fall of the Berlin Wall as the heart of reunified Berlin. Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy drew huge crowds for his own press-friendly, image-conscious address in this city, it's not hard to imagine the rationale running through Obama's head: I will cross oceans for a suitably statesmanlike photo-op.

Not quite as clear is the choice of backdrop his advisors will make if the speech unfolds as planned. They may simply position their candidate directly in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the imposingly colonnaded entrance to the plaza. But they might also want to allow cameras filming Obama to catch a glimpse of the brand-new American Embassy, which sits adjacent to the gate -- almost literally in its shadow -- and was formally dedicated on July 4.

In certain settings, for certain U.S. candidates, deciding to use one of our embassies as an architectural stage set would be a snap. But unlike the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan gave the most famous speech of the Cold War in 1987, the new embassy here is a structure whose symbolic meaning, even as piece of political stagecraft, is neither robust nor clear-cut.

Indeed, the $143-million embassy, designed by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, is something of an anti-monument -- a five-story, low-slung, sandstone-colored palimpsest on which is inscribed the complicated history of urbanism in Berlin, the troubled state of U.S. embassy design and the pitfalls of slavishly contextual architecture.

MRY, a firm co-founded in 1977 by the much-traveled, much-loved postmodernist Charles Moore and now run by two of his former colleagues, John Ruble and Buzz Yudell, remains dedicated to the less-than-fashionable idea that new buildings should advertise their sensitivity to the architecture surrounding them. It was precisely that trait, in fact, that helped the firm win the Berlin commission a dozen years ago.

By the early 1990s, American and German officials had preliminarily endorsed the idea of building a new U.S. embassy on the location of the old one, which was occupied only briefly before World War II and then heavily damaged during it. The site, squeezed into the southwestern corner of Pariser Platz and down the street from the Reichstag, the seat of German power recently modernized with a glass dome by the British architect Norman Foster, seemed to lend itself to a careful, contextual treatment.