US awards construction contract for its new embassy building in Delhi

The United States has awarded the contract to construct its new embassy building in New Delhi to a Alabama-based company, an official announcement said on Monday.

The contract for the construction has been awarded to Alabama-based B L Harbert International of Birmingham, it said, adding that WEISS/MANFREDI Architects of New York is the architect for the project.

"This complex will provide a safe, secure, and modern facility platform for the Embassy community and those it serves," the State Department said.

No other details about the new embassy building was immediately available.

However, according to the WEISS/MANFREDI's website, the project includes a new office building, a support annex, and a transformed landscape that will provide a secure campus for America's growing mission to India.

The new design restores the early modernist Chancery Building and recasts the 28-acre embassy compound into a multi-functional campus, it said.

It will have a new tree-lined central green offers shade, connects functional zones across the campus, and introduces reciprocal relationships between the buildings and gardens.

Inspired by India's enduring tradition of weaving together architecture and landscape, a series of cast stone screens, canopies, and garden walls introduce a resilient integrated design language that brings the campus into the 21st century, it said.

Nearly 60 years after the opening of the Edward Durell Stone-designed embassy, the rejuvenated embassy compound will express the symbolic values of American diplomacy through environmental stewardship and gives measure to the US' democratic presence in India, the website said.