view from the public roofscape
American Stir Fry is a proposal for the US Embassy in Mexico City. With this project, I aim to create a welcoming environment for people to gather, using architecture to call attention to what I feel are important democratic values--tolerance, freedom, equality and representation of individuals within a unified system. The common analogy of America as a “melting pot” conforms to a desire to blend everyone together into one entity, and eliminate any sign of difference. I propose that America is better as a stir fry than as a melting pot, recognizing and celebrating the differences among people rather than promoting total assimilation. This proposal aims to represent this “stir fry” by allowing the embassy to act as a series of distinct zones which work together to create a unified object. A variety of geometric scales, facade articulations and interior experiences are joined together with a tiled secondary ground plane created to connect the public to the embassy, and to connect the individual zones that exist underneath and behind this “ground.”
The site has been bisected into two halves, one which is fully open to the public and one which requires some level of security clearing to access. The building holding public program acts as a barrier between the publicly accessible roof and the private program and office areas beyond. In many ways my goals for the two halves of the site are the same—to create shared spaces for people to interact and feel welcome. The accessible roof-scape park uses the embassy site to give public space back to the people of Mexico City, connects to the public areas of the consulate, including a gallery, library, and café, and creates an outdoor space for interior program to spill out on to.
Individualized work pods along the street edge of the embassy offices create small, quiet work spaces for employees to use away from the open office layout, and a variety of small group meeting areas break up what would typically be a daunting stretch of desks. The offices create an environment with freedom, and provide areas for employees to step away from work and have enjoyable social interaction with their coworkers.
