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Ambassador and Mrs. Peter Westmacott in honor of former Afghani Ambassador and Mrs. Said Tayeb Jawad in support of the latter's charity to encourage education in Afghanistan. The large central hall accommodated eight or ten tables for ten with ease. I was conscious of the progress one made from the lower level entrance hall, up the monumental double staircase, onto the long principal floor hall, the reception rooms and terrace to the left and large hall for dining to the right, the smaller dining room just beyond, all a seamless progression of spaces sufficiently ornamented, a pleasure to be in and to pass through. The Embassy is a wonderful tribute not only to Lutyens' sovereign architectural abilities, the preeminence of Great Britain in the American capital's political culture, but it is an expression of the deep roots America and Britain share. The building materials, brick and trim, proportion and scale, hearken back to America's nascent architectural heritage, as much as they do to Queen Anne and Georgian England. We see and feel the presence of the State House in Boston and the Governor's Mansion in Williamsburg. That the children and grandchildren of the contractors of these buildings, of the men who would engage in the affairs of state in these buildings, and of the citizens who revered these buildings would later see them as symbols of tyranny, appropriating them for their own purposes of freedom, inspired, I suppose, Lutyens all the more to employ them as architectural antecedents. Now, well into the twentieth century, the construction of this imposing edifice to British power was intended to emphasize the common heritage that begot the two great world democracies, principles of which would be embraced by peoples of all backgrounds. HYLAND