Asuncion, Paraguay
The new US Embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay, is a statement of US diplomacy and tribute to Paraguayan culture and its beautiful natural environment. The new chancery celebrates the landscape with gardens and outbuildings that become a park in the city.
The US Embassy in Paraguay, received an 2025 International Architecture Honourable Mention from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
This subtropical setting has been home to the U.S. diplomatic mission since the 1950s, giving the trees and plantings decades to establish and grow. In the 20th century, the grounds functioned as a de facto arboretum and botanical garden open to the citizens of Asuncion. Throughout the landscape, a new community of plazas, gardens, buildings and breezeways is woven to truly connect visitors and staff to nature.
Highly visible along Kubitschek Avenue, the chancery is a bold composition of simple forms that reimagine details from local architecture. The material palette of board-formed concrete, local stone and transparent glazing aspires to evoke an architectural language that is familiar but novel. Much of the memorable architecture in Paraguay uses local clay brick; the craft developed over time and was a major inspiration for the new embassy’s material.
Local brick ranges in color from red and orange to light buff, following the natural hues of the earth. Dense sandstone formations are typical of the region and run beyond borders. Locally quarried Arenisca Roja (red sandstone) and Arenisca Bianca (buff sandstone) were the inspiration for sandstone and limestone selected for the project. Reminiscent of local craft tradition, the stone was handset, bringing in local artisans to participate in the construction. Using a palette inspired by the Paraguayan culture, the color and materials project a handcrafted image to the local community.
An architecture of transparency and openness reinforces the representational quality of the chancery, projecting the ideals of democracy to visitors and staff. From the perimeter walls into the buildings, a cohesive vocabulary of forms and materials ties the many functions together into a unified platform for diplomacy. A large canopy shelters diplomatic visitors and staff on their procession down from the main access pavilion to the main entrance and consular visitors on their journey up from the consular access pavilion to the consular entrance.
Shading is a vital tool to make outside spaces usable year-round; elongating the shade into breezeways helps capture wind to keep air moving. These techniques are used throughout the region, and the new campus does the same, with breezeways that define clear paths across the site and from building to building, taking advantage of the adjacent verdant landscape to further reduce the temperature and create comfortable microclimates. The play of light and shadows across the east and west facades animates the building, changing where the shadows fall throughout the day and as the seasons change.
The building’s envelopes, designed to respond to solar orientation to reduce cooling requirements and to provide a connection to nature from the interior, learn from vernacular architecture traditions to create a building that fits into Asuncion and will see through the next one hundred years.
Architects: ZGF Architects
Design Team: William McGee, Milena Di Tomaso, Jan Willemse, and Rena Simon
Landscape Architects: Annapolis Landscape Architects/AECOM
General Contractor: Caddell Construction Co., LLC.
Client: US Department of State Overseas Building Operations
Photographers: Halkin Mason Photography
