In its first purpose-built embassy building in the United States (1965–69), Australia was presented through a white prism, demonstrating a mastery of international rationalism. The young federation adopted a “palazzo-like” monumentality – a civic modernism, chisel-clad in Tennessee marble.1National calling provokes self-consciousness. As well as giving Bates Smart its mid-century name, principal designer Osborn McCutcheon, along with Hubert Banahan, also exercised the firm’s capacity to combine technical expertise with “material tactility and fine art.” This competence remains evident in the firm’s second Washington chancery, as do certain of the architect’s mid-century tropes – such as featured furniture designs and commissioned artworks, the “textural celebration of surface,” and the interior use of borrowed landscape.2Evolving continuity is the fundamental strength of Bates Smart. The abstract, totemic bronze emblem designed by Tom Bass for the first building still announces the cultural mission, while the symmetry, bronze trim and timbered assembly hall of the earlier work are reinterpreted. But the
