Architecture of Soviet diplomacy

The post -war decades have become the period of “embassy boom” in architecture. According to the memoirs of Soviet architects, the process of designing embassies, or “premises of representative offices”, as they are officially called in the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, differed from their experience on other objects. The architect was provided with relative freedom in terms of technology, materials and artistic solutions, so here, it would seem, nowhere, he had the opportunity to create an original and memorable work. But this freedom was accompanied by a dilemma characteristic of such structures: should the building interact with the real spatial context of the city and the cultural context of the host country as a whole and translate this contact in architectural forms or, like a mirror, reflect the architectural reality of its own country? How diplomatically answer this question, each architect chose himself. This book tells about the experience of designing diplomatic missions of the USSR in different parts of the world