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PARIS - There are still nearly seven weeks before its inauguration, but already the new United States Embassy in Berlin is being savaged as an architectural disaster.
A building intended to symbolise American might and values in the centre of Europe is being likened to a bunker or a fortress with about as much charm as a shopping mall.
Due to be inaugurated on July 4, the four-storey embassy occupies arguably the best piece of real estate in all Germany, sitting on the Pariser Platz square by the Brandenburg Gate.
Badly damaged during World War II and then bulldozed, the site became part of the "death strip" behind the Berlin Wall, where coils of barbed wire, tripwires, watchtowers, troops and guard dogs were deployed to prevent East Germans from escaping to the city's western sector.
The Berlin Wall's fall in November 1989 and the reunification of Germany opened the way to reviving the city's empty, weed-covered heart.
Many new buildings, such as the neighbouring French Embassy, the combined embassy of the Nordic nations and the rebuilt Hotel Adlon where Hitler once supped have become a showcase of contemporary architecture.
Not so the American embassy, whose designers, Moore Ruble Yudell of Santa Monica, California, have had the unenviable job of balancing terrorism concerns with a historic location and local sensitivities.
Most of the building is beside a main road that meets up with Pariser Platz, with a high fence and buffer zone separating it from passersby. Behind the sandstone facade are blast-resistant walls, and the rows of square windows are thick and bullet-proof.
"Fortress America Arrives In Berlin," the news weekly Der Spiegel said. The "new Fort Knox", it reported, reaches 8m below ground, almost as much as its above-ground height.
What is below ground is a closely guarded secret, although it does not include a parking garage, which was ruled out on security grounds.
The entire building sits on a concrete slab a metre thick to prevent any attack by tunnellers. Some of the concrete was brought in specially from the US. The building is encircled by hip-level barrier posts, comprising concrete-swathed steel slabs rammed more than a metre deep into the ground to deter truck bombing.
"The palette of materials and design features have been carefully considered to complement the setting and to provide an open yet secure presentation of America," the US diplomatic mission to Germany says on its website.
For critics, the building looks enclosed, inward-looking and architecturally timid, rather than the shop window of a superpower that believes in self-assurance, transparency and democracy.
"Architecture is like monuments, which tell us much more about the people in the society that builds them than the people and events for which they are erected," said Michael Cullen, an American historian of architecture who lives in Berlin. "The embassy is a reflection of America's loss of prestige, loss of moral authority and lack of interest in creating a major splash."
But Cullen also sympathised with the architects, who "did as well as they could" given the constraints.
The security fixation predates the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. In fact, the US State Department is required to heed guidelines set down after a truck bomb hit the US Embassy in Lebanon in 1983. These stipulate that embassies should be on sites of at least 6ha or more in locations far from city centres, that the buildings be set back 30m from the street and that use of glass be reduced, with a window-to-wall ratio of no more than 15 per cent.
Such requirements run into problems with an inner-city site such as Pariser Platz. The architects' hopes to give the building some lavish, softening touches were dashed when Congress slashed the US$180-million budget by a third.
