The Power Plant

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist and researcher who has spent more than a decade exploring the architectural and socio-political history of Cold War-era US embassies. In his most recent exhibition, Embassy at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, he employs a range of media, including full-scale architectural structures, video, and archival materials, to shed light on the controversies behind the design and construction of American embassies in different capitals around the world. On the exhibition grounds of Embassy, Gower reimagines and recreates structures from the preliminary designs or construction of US embassies in Iraq, Cuba, Vietnam, and Ottawa. And in the process, he reveals how the United States government attempted to represent itself as progressive, transparent, and trustworthy in foreign countries through its references to local cultural symbols and choice of building materials.

While growing up in British Columbia, Gower’s early interest in design came from his father’s profession as an architect. At the age of ten, he would eagerly read his father’s architecture magazines from cover to cover while watching him work at his studio after school. Gower would later realize that his father’s collection of handcrafted utilitarian objects from trips to Mexico City and Zihuatanejo, would function as an early lesson about industrial design. At the same age, the artist remembers receiving a special postcard from his father that would change his life. The postcard featured a photograph of the Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a mosaic facade that references Mexican history, Aztec cosmology, and the presence of Spanish colonialization. Perhaps it was this encounter that served as the impetus for Gower to begin his lifelong journey of understanding how a culture, community, or nation tells their story and heritage through architecture. He went on to study at Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) before embarking on his own travels to Cologne, Germany, and Mexico City.

Gower’s Case Study (Embassy) series focusing on the US embassy construction program began in 2012, and has gradually taken shape through commissions from museums and biennials in the United States, Europe, and Asia. When The Power Plant commissioned him to create a new installation for Embassy, he decided to research an unrealized embassy that would have been built across from the Parliament Buildings in Canada’s capital city. In 1958, the US Department of State commissioned architect Harold Spitznagel to build an embassy predominantly clad in transparent glass, despite the fact that this facility would be potentially used by international agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undertake covert operations. Although the original sketches have been lost, Gower learned that Spitznagel was working on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Visitor Center in the Black Hills of South Dakota at that time. Based on photographs and film clips of the completed Visitor Center, Gower speculates on what a 1950s embassy for Ottawa may have looked like if it had been built, with a geometric facade composed of large glass windows. In his installation Ottawa Case Study (2024), Gower suspends a stainless steel skeletal framework from the ceiling, visible from all angles. One cannot help but wonder: if a larger US embassy had been built as planned next to the existing embassy on Parliament Hill, how much influence would the US have had in Canadian politics, with Gower’s edifice serving as a haunting reminder of what might have been.

Yet this would not be the first or last time that the United States would try to spy on its neighbouring country. During the 1962 to 1963 Canadian election campaign, US president John F. Kennedy sent his renowned pollster, Louis Harris, to help Lester B. Pearson, the Leader of the Liberal Party, win against Prime Minister John Diefenbaker of the Progressive Conservative Party. When Harris arrived in Canada (with the aid of a fake passport), he hired five hundred women to make phone calls and conduct “the most extensive public-opinion research operation ever seen at that point in Canadian politics.” In fact, the original U.S. embassy in Ottawa (built in 1932, at 100 Wellington Street, and still in use in the 1960s) leaked anti-Diefenbaker stories to the media to boost Pearson’s campaign. The Liberals ended up winning a minority government, and Pearson would be in office until 1968. Even though a much larger US embassy was never built opposite the Parliament Buildings, Gower’s sculpture in Ottawa Case Study draws attention to the histories of interference and infiltration in US–Canada relations. Perhaps the hollow facade becomes a reminder to not take information at face value. Gower addresses the embassy complexes’ lack of transparency in the public eye by inviting visitors to see through their facades and false appearances.

Gower’s reimagining of diplomatic architecture highlights how embassies will always exemplify a double bind. Are they a bridge or a fortress? Today, US embassies made of concrete and steel provide an impenetrable barrier against outside forces while also projecting an image of power and legitimacy. Case closed? Not a chance. Beyond their high levels of security, perhaps there are more secrets and untold histories that Gower will soon excavate from their archives in his future Cold War case studies.