The question of a theory for embassy architecture is a question of the nature of a border crossing in the reception of architecture.

In addition to the pure problem of communication between different or related societies and cultures, the special attraction of curiosity about the unknown - and especially in European culture - is the anxiety about the possibly overpowering foreign, which must be domesticated or subdued before it prepares to become overpowering itself. For the latter two forms of competing or destructive intercultural exchange, "Orientalism" or "colonialism" can be cited as typical European examples.

However, embassies are first and foremost, per se, formalized transmissions of messages which, in the view of the sender of the message, cannot be understood by the recipient without further ado and which are, so to speak, transmitted in a conditioned form. Messages therefore always contain a high degree of uncertainty, because even if the recipient has known the information, the message presented to him must appear completely new to him as the sender's authentic message - it would even seem strange if he refused to do so.