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The U.S. Embassy Campus in Niamey, Niger, was completed in 2022, mere months before the country’s president, Mahamed Bazoum, would be jailed by a military junta. It was one of seven recent coups d’état in the Sahel, a 2,300 square-mile region that includes Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, as well as Niger, which is now nominally governed by Bazoum’s jailers, the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland—an organization that just this week called for America’s ouster from the country. Needless to say, there are a lot of eyes on the U.S.’s presence in the region focused in a physical sense on the 34,000 square-foot LEED Platinum embassy campus designed by Miller Hull with Page Southerland Page, and a 2023 AIA Virginia Award of Honor recipient.
Page has lots of secure embassy work in its portfolio, too, working for more than three decades with the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations to design, maintain, upgrade, and preserve embassies and consulates in 100 countries. As you would expect, the campus includes state-of-the-art security features for its new chancery, recreation hall, and pool, and a residence hall addition for stationed Marines. The amenity-rich design for the American diplomatic corps, State Department employees, soldiers, and families, is also about bolstering infrastructure—not always the glitziest of pursuits, and yet the Miller Hull and Page teams elevated everyday architecture to be more than connective tissue—an entry pavilion for the adjacent American International School, a warehouse addition, a utility pavilion, and a service access pavilion.
Case-in-point, the photovoltaic array—a 700 kilowatt solar energy farm that generates more than the campus’ needs. For comparison’s sake, a capacity of 700 mW is about the size of the “community-solar” operations you find in large rural towns like Bristol or Merrifield (both with populations just under 20,000. (The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s “Sharing the Sun Community Solar Data Project” maintains a reasonably current list of community solar farms throughout the U.S., which you may search by production capacity, state, utility that services it, and other criteria.)
Miller Hull and Page rightly surmised that an arid climate with tons of sun is ideal for a photovoltaic array. It’s a practical move—to create a self-sustaining power grid that doesn’t rely on the local infrastructure—and it’s also a strategic one, as well—to demonstrate independent energy leadership in a 2,300 square-mile region amid Chinese, French, and Russian economic influences.
The future is uncertain for Americans in NIger, however. In April, U.S. military officials announced it would withdraw 1,000 troops at its two bases. This month, the diplomatic corps continues to negotiate an agreement with junta leaders to leave behind some troops, and a CNN reported on May 10 that a delegation recently arrived to iron out the details. This embassy project’s function will be tested far quicker and more rigorously than anyone imagined as last-ditch diplomatic efforts unfold, and Miller Hull and Page’s work will surely take center stage in the process.
Architecture Firm/Architect of Record: Page Southerland Page, Inc.
Design Architect: Miller Hull Partnership
Owner: U.S. Department of State
Contractor: BL Harbert International, LLC
Geotechnical Engineer: Schnabel Engineering
Civil Engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers
MEP Engineer: Mason & Hanger
Structural Engineer: Ehlert Bryan Consulting Structural Engineers
Blast Engineer: Weidlinger Associates, Inc.
Photographers: Amber Renee Design and Kevin Scott