Doors
Doors
Author(s): Guy LivingstonSubject(s): Architecture, Aesthetics, Rural and urban sociology, Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Cold-War History, History of Art
Published by: SAGE Publications Ltd
Keywords: Hague; doors; former embassy of United States; architecture; brutalist architecture; Cold War architecture;
Summary/Abstract: In 2018, the US government moved its Dutch embassy to a new building in a suburb of The Hague and closed their previous headquarters near the city center. The original building is a 1950 brutalist monument designed by Marcel Breuer, which had always contrasted painfully with the elements of its 18th-century plaza, its beautiful brickwork, imitation gas lights, and linden trees. Of course the Americans did not move for esthetic reasons: its location downtown made it a security risk and the Americans were as unhappy with it as were the local residents who detested the black hole it had made in the urban fabric. This essay is the story of how I came to spend a year in the abandoned ex-embassy, an icon of Cold War architecture.
- Issue Year: 28/2020
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 21-28
- Page Count: 8
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF