"The new 180 million euro Chancery building, conceptualized in 1996 by Moore Ruble Yudell, has its main entrance facing north towards the famous Pariser Platz. Its eastern side abuts an existing bank building, and the west side of the land faces a main highway. The south side also faces a street, towards the German Holocaust memorial. Pariser Platz is most famous for the Brandenburg Gate at its western entrance. The small Haus Sommer building, also housing a bank, is in between the northwest corner of the new U.S. Chancery and the Brandenburg Gate. Close to the Pariser Platz and the new Chancery is the Reichstag building, home to the German Bundestag. Located on Pariser Platz, or on the same city blocks that surround Pariser Platz are the French and British embassies as well as the Hotel Adlon. With the exception of the Brandenburg gate, which was heavily damaged in World War II, all other former structures that surrounded Pariser Platz were destroyed during the war, or else demolished by the East German government by about 1960. From 1960 through the German Reunification in 1990, Pariser Platz held only open fields on both sides of the major boulevard Unter den Linden. In 1992, the governments decided that a new American embassy building would be built on the site, and in 1993 a memorial announcing these plans was placed in the open field.
Construction of all of the replacement buildings on Pariser Platz was begun in the mid-1990s, and by the late 1990s, this construction was complete, but with one exception: the proposed building for the American Embassy. The United States was the last large Allied nation to have its plans for an embassy building in Berlin carried out. France moved into its new Chancery in 2000, and the United Kingdom in 2002. Both of these are in the area of the Pariser Platz.
The design for the new Chancery, by American architectural firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners, was finalized in 1996. Since that time, and until construction started in 2004, parts of the building design were changed many times, largely due to security considerations and the sometimes conflicting wishes of the Berlin government to retain free public access around all building on the Pariser Platz site. Delays in funding by the U.S. Congress delayed construction further, and the project languished for a time. Nevertheless, waivers to U.S. government security standards were in place virtually from the beginning. After the 1998 United States embassy bombings and the subsequent focus on embassy security, the waiver of security standards was rescinded by the Diplomatic Security Service, the law enforcement and security arm of the U.S. State Department. High-level talks between the U.S. and German governments over security issues at the Pariser Platz site took place for almost five years before an agreement was reached and a new security waiver was issued, this time by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The security waiver stood after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The main sticking points for the U.S. side had been the amount of stand-off distance between the public street and the embassy facade, with fears of a vehicle-borne bomb being the biggest factor taken into consideration. The proposed realignment of the street on the west side of the proposed Chancery was met with alarm by historical preservationists, who argued that the street realignment would take away from the Brandenburg gate's appearance. Also, on the south side of the proposed Chancery is the recently completed German national Holocaust memorial, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This memorial itself was mired in deep controversy during its planning and construction. There had been concerns that moving the street south of the proposed Chancery might impinge on the Holocaust memorial.
Slight variation to the above referenced streets bordering the Chancery site were agreed upon by the U.S. State Department. Anti-ram bollards that fit architecturally with Pariser Platz were also agreed upon.
On October 6, 2004 construction began. The completion of the main structural parts of the building on October 10, 2006, was cause for a German construction ritual called Richtfest (i.e., the topping-out ceremony).
The new Chancery building is not large enough to accommodate the large number of personnel of the American Embassy. The Clay Allee building continued to be used. Parking is limited at the new Chancery.
The German news media strongly criticized the aesthetics of the new American embassy building, often calling it banal and ugly — especially as compared with the embassies of many other nations in Berlin. For example, the German daily newspaper Die Welt ran the headline "Ugly but safe - the new US-Embassy""
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