Category: Design

In the 1960s, a distinguished guest showed up at the U.S. State Department and never left. It was the 18th century.

Until the ’60s, the State Department’s home, the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., which was completed in 1941 with more than a million square feet of floor space, was thoroughly modern in style and not in a good way. Boxy rooms displayed cut-rate furniture. Fluorescent lights cast their greenish glow on government officials and international dignitaries.

“I can’t tell you, they were so awful,” said Selwa Roosevelt, a former State Department chief of protocol, referring to the reception rooms used for meetings and meals with important visitors. Roosevelt, who is 93, was a young society journalist married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt when she first encountered those spaces during the Eisenhower administration.

“I remember a horrid green rug,” she said. “It was disgraceful. I felt so sorry that our country would have anything so awful.”

She was not alone. But in the late 1960s, the architect Edward Vason Jones began to bedazzle the State Department’s eighth floor with cornices, columns, coffers and gilding. Paintings, furnishings and decorative objects representing the period from 1740 to 1840 filled the rooms, eventually growing into a collection of more than 5,000 museum-quality items. The rarities included Francis Scott Key’s chairs, Dolley Madison’s coffee cup and the table on which the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War was signed in 1783.

In the 1980s, it was the seventh floor’s turn. Allan Greenberg, the architect who gave its conference rooms and office suites their glamorous neo-Classical-style makeovers, recalled that the original spaces had been aptly described as “out of a Sears, Roebuck catalog.” He brought the total number of Cinderella-ed rooms to 42. And as before, every art piece, every gold flake, every carpet thread was donated or paid for by private funders.

An opulent new book called “America’s Collection: The Art & Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State” (Rizzoli/Electa) tells this story in pictures of frumpy interiors turned into glittering set pieces. More substantively, it relates how classical design was marshaled to communicate the Enlightenment principles that shaped a young country and continued to lend it authority on a global stage.

The rooms, which have been closed for renovations and updating, preserving their antique character, as the State Department building itself is re-roofed, will reopen Sept. 26. Members of the public can book visits at iipstate.my.site.com and can explore the rooms online in a self-guided virtual tour.

Woven through the book is Clement C. Conger, the deputy chief of protocol who started what he called the Americana Project in 1961 and oversaw it for the next three decades. A man with a silver tongue and an iron will, he convinced collectors that it was their patriotic duty to donate their treasures to the State Department and take a tax write-off.

Leslie B. Jones, the director of museum affairs and chief curator at the Preservation Society of Newport County in Rhode Island, worked in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms as a graduate student in 2009, where she pored over Conger’s correspondence five years after his death. She pointed out that as the market for such treasures rose in the 1970s, the donors could have made more money selling them at auction. But Conger, who had no curatorial training, elbowed out art dealers and museums in his acquisition of rare objects.

“His nicknames were never ending,” Jones said: “’The Elvis Presley of the geriatric set.’ ‘The most elegant stickup artist in North America.’” (His New York Times obituary mentioned another: the “Grand Acquisitor.”)

“We owe Mr. Conger such a debt,” Roosevelt, who was the chief of protocol in both Reagan administrations, said. “He was difficult and kind of persnickety, but he knew what he was doing.” She recalled a contretemps when Secretary of State George Shultz wanted to have dancing in the Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room, a light-blue salon that took design cues from Monticello. Conger “almost had a fit,” she said. “He didn’t want us messing up the floor.”

This elegant two-story domain is no Situation Room — the White House security complex that was recently gutted and rebuilt in a $50 million makeover — but, still, it requires maintenance. Leading a reporter around the eighth floor, Virginia B. Hart, the Diplomatic Reception Rooms’ current director, skirted electricians updating the wiring, painters applying faux wood grain patterns to walls and contractors preparing the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room to receive a new multi-ton carpet.

The Franklin room was gasp-inducing even with workers buzzing around it. Almost 100 feet long, it had eight cut-glass chandeliers and a replica of the Great Seal of the United States as its ceiling medallion. The original mauve paint color scheme was too strong to complement the variety of linens and floral arrangements that would be picked out for luncheons, and had been toned down to off-white, Hart said. (This revised palette better reflected the room’s inspiration, an 18th-century neo-Classical mansion in England called Kedleston Hall.) The new blue-and-gold carpet, a gift of the former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his wife, Renda Tillerson, was being shipped from Georgia and would make its entrance by crane.

Hart opened a carved wood door in the elevator lobby that led to her 1960s office, somewhat like Lucy passing through the wardrobe from Narnia into drizzly England. Returning through the doorway to the Federal period, she paused at a 1776 grandfather clock that played six different Revolutionary War-era songs; a circa-1778 John Singleton Copley portrait of a woman with powdered hair and a Lauren Bacall profile; and an undated painting of a young Black flutist whose identity art historians are still trying to figure out.

At a display of Chinese export porcelain, Hart recalled how the dishes had been commissioned in the early 19th century by an American dry goods merchant named Benjamin Leedom. He sent a plate he admired to China as a model. “It was beautifully copied with an R, not an L,” Hart said. “He was very disappointed. Apparently, it’s one of the great unbroken services because he didn’t use it.”

How would a Chinese visitor today feel about that linguistic hiccup? Don’t the contemporary insights and values that complicate the way we view, say, portraits of slave-owning Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson, or bucolic landscapes with doomed Indigenous Americans, become even more fraught when such works are used as backdrops for diplomacy, as they have been in these rooms?

John Kerry, the secretary of state from 2013 to 2017, who wrote the foreword to “America’s Collection,” said that the difficult associations such objects have accrued over the centuries do not amount to roadblocks. “For some countries or for some people, some of those artifacts may be reminders of a piece of history that they might want to forget, but that’s the art of diplomacy.”

Kerry, who is now President Biden’s climate envoy, recalled inviting foreign ministers to step away from their State Department meetings to look at the architect’s table where Jefferson wrote, or the silver coffeepot that Paul Revere made for John Adams. Many dignitaries were familiar with Paul Revere’s midnight ride, he said. “Whenever you can draw parallels or uncover connections or elicit emotions, it’s a good thing. And sometimes it can have a real impact on what someone might be willing to say yes to.”

Hart, while dedicated to keeping the rooms and objects pristine, is not a preserver-in-amber. In the future, she said, contemporary artists would be adding their interpretive voices to the collection. And she has commissioned the interior designer Alexa Hampton — whose celebrated father, Mark Hampton, consulted on the White House for George Bush — to refresh one of the most hallowed spaces, the Jefferson Room.

Asked about this project, Hampton said her first duty was to the idea of classical design and her second to the spirit of Jefferson.

“In its incarnation in modern culture, classical design isn’t about creating empire or colonizing people,” she said, referring to the style’s association, for many, with antebellum plantations and imperialist monoliths. “It’s about aspiring to a better form of government, or it’s about creating harmony.” There is a high-mindedness about it, she added. “Those who are fans of classical architecture, that’s what we’re responding to: the purity, the good intentions, there’s a loveliness to it. The balance.”

In revising the room’s objects, did she find herself rejecting any pieces from the collection that she believed made an uncomfortable statement to the modern visitor about Jeffersonian America?

“Sure did,” she said.

Might she give one or two examples?

“Sure won’t,” she said.

On a bright morning in early June, German lawmakers, Berlin city officials, ambassadors and other dignitaries clustered at the door of a hulking Modernist edifice, waiting for a Vodou priest to conclude a ritual under a tree.

The priest, Jean-Daniel Lafontant, had come from Haiti to help reopen the House of World Cultures, Berlin’s distinguished but dowdy center for non-European arts and ideas. His task was to invoke Papa Legba — guardian of thresholds and crossroads — before the doors opened on a radically reinvented institution.

The House — or H.K.W., as everyone calls it, using its German initials — is an unwieldy beast, an anachronism with promise. It has prestige and generous state funding. It has space: a 1957 congress hall with a concrete plaza and a dramatic curved roof. (The building was an American gift to West Berlin during the Cold War.)

But its mission has been ambiguous, down to the name, with its whiff of World’s Fair pavilions. Founded in 1989 at the dawn of multiculturalism, and just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, H.K.W. has yawed between programs that highlight foreignness — for instance one-country exhibitions, or “world” music and films — and more complex fare.

In recent years, with debates in Germany over migration, Israel-Palestine policy and the rise of the far right oozing into the culture sphere, H.K.W. seemed hunched in an academic stance, aiming, per its now-archived former website, to “initiate reflection processes and devise new frames of reference.”

To inject new dynamism, the government made an atypical choice for a state-run institution. Since January, it has been led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, a former microbiologist from Cameroon, who emerged as a curator, critic and charismatic figure on Berlin’s alternative art scene.

Ndikung, who became a German citizen in 2006, is H.K.W.’s first nonwhite director. The institution had never had a non-European staff curator until his ultra-diverse new team arrived. Their first move was to close H.K.W. for four months — for maintenance, but really for much more: a total overhaul of its programs and spirit.

Since reopening, H.K.W. has run at a manic pace. It held a weekend-long festival around the spirit of the Haitian Revolution, and another on artificial intelligence and ancestral knowledge. Talks and films have delved into topics like queer performance and Berlin’s Black history. The grounds throb with concerts and D.J. sets.

On view throughout the building is “O Quilombismo,” a 68-artist exhibition inspired by the quilombos, self-governed communities founded by freed and escaped enslaved people in Brazil. Many works in the show (which runs through Sept. 17) are new commissions — more evidence that Ndikung’s H.K.W. is investing serious funds.

You might say that Ndikung came out swinging, but he rejects the combat metaphor. “Love has everything to do with it,” he said in an interview in July. “How can we build society with love as a foundation? That’s really the project that we are trying to do here.”

The early returns are positive. H.K.W. is reporting record visitor numbers. The artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi, who built a child-friendly outdoor installation for the exhibition, called the reopening festivities, full of families of all backgrounds, the most joyous she’s witnessed.

Revving H.K.W. up is no small feat, even with a strong program. The building sits in a vortex of state power next to the Chancellor’s office and near Germany’s Parliament. The security presence can feel forbidding. “Whenever I pass, despite the fact that I’m the director of this institution, I have to look left and right,” Ndikung said. “That’s the truth of it.”

Ndikung said he felt no draw to H.K.W. when he arrived in Berlin as a student in the mid-1990s. After entering the arts world, he respected the institution’s seriousness, but rankled at its mind-set. “I was very critical of the House,” Ndikung said. “I wrote critical texts on the ‘othering’ that I thought happened here.”

But, he said, he applied for the job when the opening was announced in 2021 because “we can’t always be on the other side complaining that institutions should change.”

Ndikung trained as a scientist, but grew up around writers in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, and Bamenda, the main city of its English-speaking western region. His parents’ circle included professors, playwrights and poets. At the University of Yaoundé, he avoided classes, preferring to hang around musicians and artists.

He also studied German at the Yaoundé branch of the Goethe-Institut, following a friend’s lead. His mother sent potatoes from Bamenda to sell and pay the fees. When he qualified for a visa to Germany, his family mortgaged their house to support his travel. “One day I’ll write a book about my odd jobs,” he said of the work he took in construction, restaurants and more to repay them from Berlin.

Ndikung’s academic path pointed toward a brilliant career in life sciences: a biotechnology degree in Berlin, a doctorate in Düsseldorf, and postdocs in Berlin and Montpellier, France. Before he wrote seriously about art, he published on mutation mechanisms in chronic myelogenous leukemia.

But his avocation was creeping up on him. He visited Documenta, the prestigious five-yearly exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, struck that the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor had organized it. “It was like some other world,” he said — an appealing one. He began helping art students with write-ups and organizing pop-up exhibitions.

For 10 years, he stopped reading fiction to catch up on art history. “From the Renaissance painters to all the movements,” he said, “I always knew I was studying them from my vantage as an African — and seeing what was lacking in those narratives while also learning them.”

In 2009, Ndikung started the art space Savvy Contemporary with a few colleagues, first in a storefront in the immigrant-rich neighborhood of Neukölln. It later moved to Wedding, a district with a strong labor-union history. Savvy became a force, its exhibitions and events linking artists and scholars with local families and neighborhood characters, with an emphasis on conviviality.

Ndikung quit his last science job — at a medical equipment company — when he joined the curatorial team for Documenta 14, in 2017. As a curator and a prolific writer and critic, he has become a familiar presence on the global art circuit. Those credentials and his academic status — he is “Herr Professor Doktor Ndikung,” even if his qualifications are not in the arts — check the official boxes to lead H.K.W.

But his success at Savvy was a crucial factor, said Andreas Görgen, the secretary general of Germany’s culture ministry. “He has proven that he is able to steer a house as a community focal point,” Görgen said of Ndikung. “Now we are asking him to take these skills and support the community building of Germany as an immigrant society.”

Ndikung’s new role lands him in Germany’s political battles, as Claudia Roth, the culture minister, made clear in an effusive but pointed speech at H.K.W.’s reopening. She thanked him warmly for choosing to become German, then pivoted, noting that this made him part of a “Täternation” — a nation of perpetrators, referring to guilt for Nazism and the Holocaust.

After lauding “intersectional solidarity,” she cautioned that the B.D.S. movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over Palestinian occupation — a campaign that Germany’s Parliament designates as antisemitic — would not be tolerated.

Ndikung has heard it before. After his nomination by Roth’s predecessor, Monika Grütters, in 2021, the newspaper Die Welt accused him of B.D.S. sympathies. Detractors pointed to a 2014 Facebook post in which he said Israel would “pay a millionfold” for its bombings of Gaza. Ndikung has repeated that he does not support B.D.S.; Roth, in office by then, supported him.

The bigger context is the current state of German “memory culture,” in which accusations of antisemitism are routinely levied against critics of Israeli policy (even Jewish ones), resulting in a series of event cancellations and withdrawn invitations for Palestinian thinkers from German institutions.

Last year, the appearance of an antisemitic image within a mural-like work by an Indonesian collective at Documenta 15 led to the resignation of the exhibition’s director. As H.K.W. director, Ndikung knows that critics await any slip-up.

But he also wants to lift the debate from its bog. “The real antisemites in this country, and xenophobes and anti-Muslims,” he said, “are gathering forces.” He pointed to recent polls that showed support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party at more than 20 percent. “This is what we should focus on,” he said.

At H.K.W., Ndikung has launched a discussion series on memory politics in Germany and Europe, hosted by the Jewish writer Max Czollek. “Memory culture is fundamental,” Ndikung said. “The question is how to deal with it in a productive way.”

His overhaul of the institution includes another kind of commemoration. It has named every space for a woman in the arts or social movements, with explanatory placards. You might come in through the Nawal El Saadawi Entrance, cross the Sylvia Wynter Foyer, or ascend the Gloria Anzaldúa Stairs. The congress hall is now the Miriam Makeba Auditorium.

Like the Vodou ritual at the reopening, renaming the spaces is ceremonial and symbolic. In his opening speech, Ndikung spoke of “inviting other spirits” and “reinhabiting” the institution, of finding peaceful coexistence with all “animate and inanimate beings.”

It’s a different energy for a German public institution — not necessarily in sync with its counterparts — but Ndikung isn’t worried about that. “We want to build a different world,” he said. “We want to think of the world differently,” he added, “and every step matters. Every drop of water matters. And even if you’re coming with a teaspoon, that’s fine.”