This thesis examines the territorial, spatial, and political Gaps inherent in the Embassy as program and type. Located in Havana, the project transforms such Gaps into an architectural strategy for the Embassy of the 21st century. An Embassy serves a practical and symbolic purpose. It administrates Visa applications, at the same time representing a country’s culture and projecting its political power. In an Embassy one country’s sovereign territory is embedded in the physical territory of another, making the Embassy the spatial embodiment of a political boundary. The exterior is charged with the politics of the boundary while the space inside is a neutral limbo – a territorial and political Gap. The Embassy is sited in Havana. A politically isolated country, Cuba provides a fertile ground to explore the changing Cuban-American relations. There is now the political possibility for diplomatic interaction, but without an American Embassy in Cuba, there is no physical space for this exchange. An Embassy is needed to facilitate Cuban immigration while at the same time engaging a new diplomatic relationship between the two countries. The time is ripe for a new Embassy.

In this study, it is aimed to relate architecture with the changing definitions of territory. In this context, the research will focus on the issue of in-between, where the boundaries between public and private domains are blurred in the modern world. The Dutch Embassy in Berlin designed by OMA / Rem Koolhaas is built upon a creative redefinition of blurring boundaries between &amp / #8216 / public&amp / #8217 / and &amp / #8216 / private&amp / #8217 / . Given the fact that the Embassy is a diplomatic structure for which the safety factor is one of the most important design criteria, how Koolhaas interprets the idea of openness, of transparency, modernity which are meant to symbolize the Netherlands, will be studied in this research.