ABSTRACT
In 2017, the American delegation to the Court of St. James will leave the embassy on Grosvenor Square for a new building in South London. In the 1990s, Jane Loeffler and Ron Robin published important interpretations of the building that considered it through the lens of the US State Department's ambitious post-war foreign building program and both historians pay close attention to the important London project. This chapter examines Saarinen's design strategies toward the goal of revealing the embassy to be a complex work of diplomatic stagecraft, one that looked beyond its host nation to the larger field of the Cold War. The point of bringing up Saarinen's wartime experience is to suggest that the design for the embassy was filtered through what he had learned in the OSS about communicating political messages and creating meaningful symbols. The design trajectory of the eagle reflects the difficulties in bringing modern art into the project.
