Good fences make compensating embassy neighbors

Walls keep people out, but they also lock people in.

The arresting aesthetic juxtapositions that one takes in on a stroll down Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., can make it feel like walking through an architecture textbook. Brazil’s modernist glass chancery by Olavo Redig de Campos (1906-84) flanks its neoclassical ambassadorial residence by John Russell Pope (1874-1937), and the Georgian revival Japanese…