Designing for 120-degree heat, calculating the costs of building in a city without electricity, and making fortresses seem friendly dare all in a day’s work for Sorg Associates, of Washington, D.C. There’s a lot to investigate when you’re designing embassy housing for the U.S. State Department, as the firm has done in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Planning and design typically lasts two years, one-third longer than stateside projects, because there are so many forces outside the architects’ control. “Midstream there may be more of a feeling of threat, so we’re asked to change the building structure for more security,” says Suman Sorg, FAIA. Security issues, of course, drive the design of everyday life at embassy compounds, especially in the Middle East. Babysitters and pizza delivery vehicles must pass through major checkpoints; service access to utilities and mechanical systems must be located outside the buildings and never on the roof. In the larger scheme, Sorg says, “there’s also been a shift in thinking: Is it safer to be on compound or off, scattered around or concentrated?”
Those concerns are continually being balanced with the desire to build international bridges. In Kuwait, for example, the firm chose brick because it’s familiar to Americans, but used it in an arabesque pattern common in the Middle East. That choice of material involved researching the type and weight of mortar needed for the bricks, which are concrete rather than clay. And on a current embassy project in a city lacking infrastructure (which must remain unnamed), Sorg speced a local sandstone that’s part of the country’s gross national product. Without electricity, the stone had to be shipped elsewhere for cutting. “It’s very brittle, so we had to calculate the amount of breakage that might happen in shipping it back and forth,” Sorg says.
Learning the nuances of indigenous architecture widens the firm’s creative reach. Shelter takes on new meaning in the 120-degree heat of Kuwait, where much of the play space retreats inside and courtyards are kept small and shaded. “Those kinds of things are very interesting and change from locality to locality,” Sorg says. “It’s so much fun. We get to learn the customs of how people really live.”
