Case Study -

Cultural Assessment for a U.S. Embassy Compound

Overview

Anthropology in Action served as the design anthropologist for a U.S. Embassy compound under an OBO contract requiring specialized cultural expertise. The project demonstrates how ethnographic research identifies critical gaps between programmatic requirements and operational reality and then systematically translates these findings into architectural decisions that improve both facility performance and user experience.

The compound serves American diplomatic staff and their families, locally employed staff who navigate cultural duality daily, and visa applicants arriving with migration anxiety and family separation trauma—each group experiencing the same facility through different power relations and emotional stakes.

The Challenge

Embassy design is driven by stringent security, safety, and operational standards, which can overshadow lived experience and cultural context. OBO recognizes this gap and engages specialists to ensure diplomatic facilities are responsive to local culture and climate while conveying American values. Without cultural expertise integrated into the design process, embassies risk reproducing operational failures in new construction—perpetuating conditions that undermine the diplomatic relationships they exist to support.

Key challenges included:

• Balancing security requirements with spaces that feel welcoming, legible, and culturally appropriate.
• Designing for diverse user groups with different power positions and relationships to the U.S. government.
• Accounting for the emotional weight of consular processes, including family separation and migration stress.
• Integrating local cultural context, aesthetic references, and social norms into U.S. government architecture.
• Designing for dignity and trauma-informed experience in a highly regulated, high‑stakes environment.

Approach

Phase 1: Immersion & Planning

• Embedded in the design team from early concept stages, reviewing program documents, security guidelines, and meeting regularly with the Principal Architect and key OBO stakeholders to ensure cultural findings could influence design decisions before schemes were finalized.
• Developed a tailored research strategy grounded in the specific political, historical, and cultural context of the host country rather than a generic stakeholder engagement template, identifying which user groups carried operational knowledge the design team needed to access.
• Conducted desk research on diplomatic relations, migration histories, workplace norms, family structures, and local political dynamics affecting how the compound would be used and perceived, establishing baseline understanding before field research.

Phase 2: Ethnographic Field Research

• Conducted an intensive on‑site fieldwork period dedicated to understanding how the existing and future facilities function for real users.
• Methods included in‑depth interviews with embassy staff across departments, focus groups with locally employed staff on workplace culture, and interviews with consular applicants and family members about their experiences using consular services.
• Supplemented interviews with observation of current operations and circulation patterns, plus visits to local cultural institutions and informal conversations with community members about perceptions of the U.S. presence.
• Used open-ended, non-technical questioning to surface pain points, aspirations, informal practices, and expectations for how spaces should support work and life, beyond formal programmatic requirements.

Phase 3: Synthesis & Implementation

• Organized qualitative data into core analytic buckets—recurring pain points, design opportunities, space needs (e.g., types of rooms, thresholds, adjacencies), and cultural representation gaps (where people felt unseen, misread, or excluded by current environments).
• Mapped these themes directly onto design levers such as:
  • Program elements and adjacencies (e.g., how waiting areas, interview spaces, and staff areas relate).
  • Circulation routes and queuing patterns for different user groups.
  • Environmental features (light, shade, acoustics) affecting comfort and perceived safety.
  • Opportunities for meaningful local cultural integration in materials, patterns, and artwork.
• Developed a structured recommendations matrix linking each research finding to specific design interventions, with rationale and priority level, enabling the design team to track implementation across development phases.
• Facilitated co‑design sessions with selected stakeholder groups to:
  • Validate that proposed design strategies accurately reflected their experiences and needs.
  • Invite direct input on options for spatial organization, waiting configurations, and support spaces.
  • Build buy‑in and trust by inviting stakeholders to be participants in the design process.
• Provided ongoing consultation through design development to ensure validated strategies carried through from concept into schematic design, preventing the common pattern where early research findings are lost as technical requirements dominate later phases.

What Anthropology in Action Did

Deliverables

• Early-phase cultural context brief summarizing historical, political, and socio-cultural factors shaping embassy use and perception.
• Comprehensive research report with anonymized narratives, key themes, and design implications organized by user group and program area.
• Cultural catalogue with visual and material references to guide authentic local cultural integration.
• Design recommendation package and matrix tying each theme (pain points, opportunities, space needs, representation gaps) to concrete spatial, material, and experiential decisions.
• Ongoing design consultation through A/E coordination meetings and focused workshops.
• Art strategy guidance for collaboration with local artists and institutions, aligned with OBO’s emphasis on art as a tool of cultural diplomacy.

Impact

The cultural assessment led to targeted refinements in the embassy design that improve both workplace experience and public-facing services. For example, ethnographic research identified how existing spatial conditions—such as waiting area configurations that lacked weather protection or interview spaces without acoustic privacy—were undermining the facility's diplomatic mission by creating experiences of indignity during already stressful visa processes. These findings enabled the design team to make specific spatial and material decisions that shift visitor perception of U.S. institutional presence from adversarial to supportive, strengthening the diplomatic relationships the facility exists to serve.

Outdoor and semi-outdoor areas were planned to better support staff well-being, while the consular journey was rethought to reduce unnecessary stress and create a more dignified, understandable process for applicants and families. The work also informed a clearer, respectful integration of local cultural references in a setting that previously had minimal visual representation, aligning the facility more closely with its surrounding community while maintaining all required security and operational standards.

The engagement also demonstrated a scalable model for integrating anthropologists into embassy design: starting with a focused scope that expanded into a longer-term partnership as the design team saw how systematically linking ethnographic themes to design moves prevented costly missteps and strengthened diplomatic impact.

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Note: Details have been withheld to respect project confidentiality and security considerations.