ARCH-4980.3 | Carla Leitao, Adjunct Professor

EMBASSY SPECIES FOR THE INFORMATION LANDSCAPE

KRISTEN ABRUZZESE

For the embassy, the continually buffering digital landscape represents a crisis.  As digital tools continue to take on the efforts of effectively transferring information, it pushes the historical purpose and program of embassy into a corner.

In terms of numbers, the quantity of both people and square footage required for embassies is slashed, as large staff is no longer needed, and there is no longer a need to house them in vast embassies.  Considering role, representation on purely government to government, bi-lateral relationships, is turning over into the need to consider plural interests from multiple parties beyond nation-states.

Only ten years ago, diplomats had to be foot soldiers on the ground, gathering or spying for information to send back to their host government.  That role is in many ways gone, as information is available and accessed from any capital, anywhere in the world.  In addition, ambassadors themselves are able to challenge traditional hierarchies of the Foreign Service Office, by sending out a tweet, being able to operate in real-time responding to events on the ground.

‘Disaster’ in this narrative, suggests the ways in which traditional borders and boundaries defining sovereignties are breaking down, collapsing and reforming into other terrains, negotiated by way of platforms, communities, (Facebook and Wiki), ubiquitous networks, and user data and devices.  This new information landscape is the design driver for the reassembly of a new embassy typology, paralleled with a new ambassador character.  Freed from its previous obligations, the embassy can shed its skin, and become a tool for social interface.  The project is understood by the desire to study and develop the concept and function of representation and diplomatic meeting spaces of an embassy in an innovative and experimental way.