The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

it really doesn’t make much sense, then what we’ll end up with is buildings that look like our embassy in Chile, which is my example of something that is just horrible.” That structure, design- ed in 1987 to meet the Inman standards, features nearly win- dowless brick walls, and is sur- rounded by a nine-foot wall (and a moat). “It looks like a fortress,” Justice Breyer says. “People in Santiago laugh at it.” Money won’t solve the security problems either, Breyer cautions. The issues are larger than that and involve a different sort of cost/benefit analysis. “There’s no magic formula,” he says, but when you have a public building, particularly a building that serves a diplomatic purpose, it is crucial for decision-makers to recognize “that there are competing values at stake” and take those val- ues into account in making deci- sions about security and design. Some architects equate openness with literal transparency, and argue that dramatically modern glass and steel architecture is the only proper metaphor for democ- racy, but Breyer points out that openness need not rely on glass. The Supreme Court is open, he notes, with its public plaza, its accessible hallways and its open courtroom — a place Americans can and should visit to learn about the legal system. Like other major public buildings, he says, the Supreme Court must remain open despite the challenges that may pose. When Sen. Moynihan addressed these issues in 1999, he called for an ongoing “conversation” on how F O C U S 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 “Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular age were.” — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1999