U.S. embassy: An outpost as a signpost

Both are directly connected to the same set of questions: How should an architect approach the task of designing a building to represent his home country abroad? What happens if the result -- implicitly or explicitly -- is critical of that country's past, politics or most cherished values?

Thanks to the punishingly high standards he set for himself -- not to mention a less-than-sunny way with potential clients -- Abraham, who was born in Austria and moved permanently to the United States in the mid-1960s, completed few buildings in his long career. He was far better known as a teacher and the creator of primitive, hauntingly powerful architectural drawings.

But his modest output did include one truly remarkable building: the Austrian Cultural Forum, a knife-thin, 24-story tower that opened in 2002 in midtown Manhattan as an outpost for exhibitions and discussions about Austrian culture and politics. Abraham's design for the Forum prevailed in a competition that drew entries from 226 Austrian firms -- essentially "every born Austrian architect who could walk," as Abraham put it at the time. It called for a tough, unforgiving piece of architecture: a 280-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide building squeezed between taller neighbors on East 52nd Street. Abraham famously compared its sharp-edged facade to the falling blade of a guillotine.

What, then, does the building say about Austria? It conjures a combination of severity and visionary thinking in that nation's culture and suggests a range of influences miles away from "The Sound of Music": the work of Sigmund Freud; the angular, brooding paintings of Egon Schiele; and the stripped-down architecture of Adolf Loos, to name three. It also seems to hint at the far darker precedents of Hitler and the Holocaust.

It would be easy to caricature the building as a bitter expatriate's attempt to express frustration with his home country -- and, indeed, Abraham, dismayed by the rise of the late right-wing politician Joerg Haider, among other developments, renounced his Austrian citizenship just weeks before the Forum was completed.

But if the design is plagued by doubt about Austria's political history and its place in the world, it is precisely that doubt that gives the building its honesty and forthrightness and therefore its power. Whether that same level of honest self-examination is even possible in a contemporary American embassy is debatable, of course. The Austrian Cultural Forum had many urban and architectural constraints to deal with, given its almost comically narrow site, but it is also a cultural rather than diplomatic outpost and thus capable of pursuing architectural innovation, even radicalism.

Abraham's building also gains much of its energy from its engagement with the wider city, particularly in the slightly menacing way it looms out over the sidewalk. We now build American embassies, by contrast, deep within concentric circles of blast protection.

Still, the competition for the London embassy has stirred up many of the same questions that surrounded Abraham's proposal. And they have grown only louder since the winning design, by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, was announced Feb. 23.

The following day it was revealed that the two British members of the jury for the embassy competition, architect Richard Rogers and developer-art collector Peter Palumbo, had disagreed strongly with their colleagues' decision -- and had sent a letter to the State Department arguing that the KieranTimberlake entry, which calls for an elegant and energy-efficient if rather unassuming glass cube, was simply not ambitious enough. Rogers and Palumbo wrote that another design, by Thom Mayne and his Santa Monica firm, Morphosis, was, as a report in the Guardian newspaper put it, "touched by genius" and should have prevailed.

Second thoughts

At first, the dissent from Rogers and Palumbo appeared mostly symbolic: a joint complaint from two influential players used to getting their way in the London architecture world. The Morphosis design they praised, after all, calls for a sagging embassy that is practically collapsing in on itself. For all its boldness and unsettled power, it seems to symbolize a wounded America struggling to hide from a growing number of antagonists behind a series of jagged concrete walls.

There's no way the American government would ever actually build that design, is there? Perhaps not: Like many influential but losing competition entries in architectural history, the Morphosis proposal may simply be a vehicle for advancing certain ideas that students and fellow architects will study in years ahead.