The Voice of the World

Public Opinion and the World Parliament

Initial plans for the Assembly Hall appeared during the meetings of the Preparatory Commission in London. The first UN General Assembly would convene there on January 10, 1946, while the Inspection Group and the Headquarters Planning Committee were evaluating sites in New York and elsewhere for the temporary headquarters. Delegates expected that the entire world community would follow the inaugural assembly in newsreels or wireless broadcasts. At the first meeting of the Executive Committee, British diplomat Philip Noel-Baker proclaimed public opinion “the life-blood” of the organization. Noel-Baker, who had served as assistant to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations Sir Eric Drummond, believed that the inclusion of the general public (or even a meaningful invitation to the general public) depended on a robust media infrastructure. Mass media would be an invaluable tool in institutional efforts to internationalize the UN’s “methods of democracy” and participation.5 Mass media would stand in for the general public that the organization could not accommodate in its venues, but would also allow the UN to connect directly with local publics around the world, circumventing the governments of sovereign nations—or at least, that was Noel-Baker’s ambition.

Diplomats and politicians had been researching the implications of the presence of mass media since the preparation for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration asked writer Groff Conklin, at the time working for OSS intelligence, to draft recommendations. Conklin, studying the approach of Woodrow Wilson’s administration to the question of the press in 1919, argued that the “open diplomacy” of U.S. foreign policy that at the time admitted the press inside negotiations without any regulation in actuality opened the doors to the circulation of disinformation. “Absence of secrecy would have meant a free press. A free press would have meant an inordinate amount of press misinformation,” he argued. Instead, Conklin suggested that the administration should institutionalize and order the presence of mass media, with crucial conferences (including the Dumbarton Oaks meetings) taking place behind closed doors and press conferences offering structured moments of interaction with press representatives. Intelligence services should be involved, ample communications infrastructures and accommodations should be provided, and a well-organized press protocol should be delineated.6 The goal was for the U.S. delegation to get control over the circulation of news, and by extension public opinion at large.7

In response the 1945 San Francisco Conference further standardized the publicity protocol, appointing “principal” officers for regularized meetings with the press. But the experience on the ground demonstrated that mass media remained a troublesome bedmate: cardinal to the institution, yet invasive and driven by drama and profit.8 Diplomats feared that the presence of journalists would transform political participation into a spectacle driven by personal vanity, undermining political work on the ground and encouraging populist approaches that accentuated conflict and antagonism. U.S. State Department officials associated the populist language that came with mass media spectacle with the disastrous effects of press coverage during earlier attempts at international organization, and delegates often protested the uneven coverage of speakers, which they found distracting from the issues and negotiations at hand. Noise was another source of complaint, as UN officials sought to establish diplomatic discourse as neutral, tempered, and rational. But there were also political anxieties at play that the presence of mass media accentuated, with national representatives, often upper-class white members of economic elites, trying to maintain their status within the new world order and its media noise. Ultimately, photographers and cameramen in attendance at the opening and signing of the UN Charter distressed officials and politicians, who noted that cameras, flashes, and their continuous chatter were a source of “discomfort and annoyance.”9

During the first meeting of the UN General Assembly in London the effort to invite yet mitigate the disruptive function of mass media continued. National representatives wanting to reach their domestic audiences back home asked for “speedy, unrestricted and uncensored telegraph, telephone, radio and postal communications with the world at large.”10 Even the Special Advisory Committee on Information that coordinated the collection, archiving, and circulation of information contended that all official organs should meet in public, with the exception of special Security and Trusteeship Council meetings, revealing the tiered publicness of UN organs.11 A clear protocol would help, but the regulation of mass media’s interfacing with the new organization required architectural solutions.

Delegates wondered how photographs, newsreels, and broadcasts would attract the world’s investment in the UN’s public sphere. For some, media such as film and photography should merely transmit snippets of the UN’s structured public appearance, but for others this relay was not enough to bring people in. Noel-Baker argued against the presence of filming crews and photographers, not for their disruptive nature, but for their claims of indexing reality, which to the British diplomat hampered “the imagination of the peoples” and affixed perceptions of diplomatic work. Instead, he professed, wireless broadcasts and articles, with their textual representations of diplomacy, stimulated the work of imagination, allowing for a spectrum of possible interpretations of how global institutions work, but also prompting publics to actively envision themselves there.12 One’s place within this system—visitor, press, delegate, adviser, non-governmental organization representative—also garnered different levels of access to UN platforms. A delegate would both watch and listen to the deliberations, but was the same level of participation desirable also for the larger public? Delegates from the Netherlands and Chile advocated for “pictorial publicity” to be centrally administered, arguing that images were essential for endowing new bodies such as the General Assembly with the authority of a formed presence. Those debates highlighted how the UN as a multilateral organization, in managing the medium—radio, television, film—to control its representation to the public, hoped to also manage operational imaginations of liberal internationalism.

For the first London meeting of the UN General Assembly, there were two main questions at stake. First, the organization needed to determine how the general public would participate within its structured public sphere. Second, it needed to organize and order in space national representatives, civic societies, administration and staff so as to present itself as a formalized public sphere to said general public. National delegations, with diplomatic representatives and their advisers; UN Secretariat staff such as typists, archivists, verbatim reporters, translators, and interpreters; high-ranking Secretariat officials; nongovernmental organizations; press representatives, filming and broadcast crews; and visitors all needed to find their places within the plenary hall and the future permanent Headquarters as well. Determining the place of those publics within UN’s assembly architecture was imperative in the launching of the General Assembly as a formalized and legitimate global public sphere in front of the press, and by extension the general public.

In London, the Preparatory Commission experimented with different spatial configurations and the placement of the press, turning the Central Hall at Westminster into a laboratory for the assembling of international bodies.13 The Commission asked the U.K. Ministry of Works team refurbishing Central Hall to remove the press from the floor, effectively separating journalists, photographers, and reporters from the assembling national representatives and their teams. In placing filming crews and photographers in the open gallery space above the delegates’ floor, the construction crew divided the space vertically in tiers of professional affiliation: the ground floor for diplomats and the galleries for the general public and the press. In doing so, the UN also reinforced and expanded the theatrical constitution of the public sphere in the middle. The more engineers, architects, and diplomats removed the journalists from the “floor,” the more the operative site of politics and diplomacy transformed into a stage.

Inside the Central Hall, UN officials further explored the visual identity of the institution to communicate structural and institutional coherence in ways that concealed the organization’s emergent nature. Optics mattered, especially as officials anticipated that the organization would wander from one temporary setting to the next for at least the immediate future. Concert halls, conference venues, skating rinks, and factories should not come to define the institution, but rather the institution should define them, even in the short time they accommodated the UN. This required the development of a toolkit of visual references that when deployed in space would immediately announce the arrival of the new international organization. The San Francisco Conference offered some initial tools, notably the UN emblem, which designers used on visitor passes, official documents, and even on the walls of the Veterans Building and the Memorial Opera House to mark the presence of the organization. The toolkit also adopted blue-gray hues for its color palette and arrays of national flags to demarcate international space. At the Central Hall in London, the same markers, incorporated into the design of platforms and banisters, signaled the presence of the UN.14

To declare the political body modern and distinct from other international organizations, the construction team employed the streamlined aesthetics of inter-war industrial design, evoking a sentiment of frictionless operation for the General Assembly (Figure 3.2). The reception, however, was mixed. Reporting for The New York Times, journalist James B. Reston lamented the loss of Central Hall’s “Victorian” exterior with the refurbished modernist (at least in his view) interior that resembled “something that Norman Bel Geddes might have designed,” adding that Central Hall, with its blue paint and drapes, seemed in between a hall prepared for a “political convention and some monstrous modernistic schoolroom.”15 If the UN was to distinguish itself from past organizations, the architects would have to adopt a bolder approach, as well as prepare to defend modernism to the press as the language of international organization.

In addition to the question of visual identity, the plenary hall also posed acoustic problems. Assembly halls intertwine techniques of listening and speaking with modes of participation and democracy. It is no coincidence that, unlike the three council chambers where the round table became the anchor object for the significations of diplomatic work (see chapter 2), at the General Assembly the Preparatory Commission would look to parliaments for the appropriate architectural type. Considering the etymological roots of the word, a parliament, Mladen Dolar notes, is ultimately “a place reserved for speech.”16 To find oneself in a parliament equates to finding oneself in a place where one voices a problem, a position, or a concern within a public sphere. This political speech as medium carries the weight of its representational function to give voice to—and in this sense to stand in for—its national constituents.

The acoustic problem presented within the UN General Assembly was both performative and constitutive in nature. The General Assembly was to offer the “felicitous conditions” for what J. L. Austin calls “speech acts,” the idea that words can do things.17 The ambition was for the voices of the world to take over the podium so that the speech acts within the General Assembly established the new institution as international in scope and democratic in character. Unlike other sites of global bureaucracies that rationalized the circulation of paper, the UN Headquarters at large and the General Assembly in particular centered in its functions the spoken word and its transmission, without, however, undoing the circuits of the written word woven around it. At Central Hall the importance of acoustics became quickly evident. The public address system that the Ministry of Works technicians had installed to reinforce and amplify the delegates’ voices inside the plenary hall and the conference rooms quickly created new—and amplified old—acoustic problems.18 The space was bigger than needed—“the whole atmosphere is that of mass rallies. . . . It is extremely unlike a meeting place of Governments,” an early memorandum stated, revealing anxieties over reverberatory acoustics and their signification. The same memorandum called for a concerted effort to “disguise the character of the Hall, and to change its ‘atmosphere,’” reducing its size with floor-to-ceiling curtains that also dampened echoes and lowering the podium closer to the floor to bring speakers near the delegates and away from the press and public in the galleries.

Part of the acoustic problem inside Central Hall related to the desire to broadcast the proceedings. The voice-as-signal registering in the microphones had to travel the conduits of the sound system uninterrupted and with clarity, regardless of environmental noise and reverberation. To create this sense of sonic clarity, Ministry of Works technicians, in collaboration with BBC engineers, came up with a soundproofing plan. Soft carpeting and other surgical acoustic treatment would reduce reverberation so that the voice-as-signal projected in space intelligibly.19 In addition, engineers had to attend to dead spots, interference from the monitoring loudspeaker on the president’s table, as well as sound leaks from recording rooms and broadcast studios.20 The Ministry of Works soundproofed conference rooms and the plenary hall,21 while installing double doors to insulate the Assembly Hall from any noise emanating from congregating journalists and press in the lobbies.22

But soundproofing Central Hall also inhibited the very acoustic function of the space: listening. National representatives attending the Preparatory Commission and the first part of the first session of the General Assembly realized that the overhanging galleries at Central Hall hampered the propagation of sound in the auditorium beneath them, creating acoustically dead zones. This was common knowledge among British delegates, who criticized gallery structures at the House of Commons for creating a depressing atmosphere, limiting their vision and hearing, and hindering their words from reaching the audience. The request to eliminate such space became a matter of “capital importance” in the later design of the Assembly Hall.23

In response to the experience at Central Hall, the UN Secretariat issued recommendations for the temporary headquarters under construction in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the General Assembly would hold the second part of its first session later in the fall of 1946. The new memorandum on conference planning covered the full range of UN–related activities, equipping the Flushing Meadows contractors and architects with detailed descriptions of the temporary headquarters. The memorandum recommended that the president’s platform be elevated to garner authority and a full view of the delegates; it advised that the speaker’s rostrum be placed in front of the president but on a lower plane, clearly denoting hierarchies within the assembly; it noted that interpreters needed direct visual contact with the speaker, an experience confirmed at Hunter College and Lake Success where the Security Council and other UN organs and committees had been convening; and it placed verbatim reporters in a pit in front of the speaker’s rostrum. The memorandum also divided delegates, advisers, press, and public, advising a desk configuration guided by the “principle of giving any speaker the feeling of having his audience gathered closely about him” for a “feeling of intimacy from the point of view of the speaker.” Barricades would distinguish between the public and the convening body on the ground floor. The memo also formalized the place of the press on the galleries, asking that delegates be separated from the general public, with dedicated entrances.24

These suggestions shaped the interior of the New York City Building that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, and architect Aymar Embury II had built for the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, and which at the time served as a skating rink. Inside the New York City Building, Natalie de Blois, a young architect who had just joined the office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) after graduating from Columbia University, converted the ice-skating rink into the plenary hall for the UN General Assembly with the help of John F. O’Brien.25 De Blois dressed the backdrop of the UN insignia with a large blue drape and placed the interpreters’ booths on the sides of the General Assembly, inside built-in booths overlooking the floor (Plate 10). She also tucked away press, filming crews, and broadcast studios behind a temporary wall closing off the second-floor open gallery. In collaboration with the U.S. Signal Corps, the construction crews wired and miked the hall, installing for the first time fully soundproofed studios for radio and film.26 As a result, the floor was cleared of that part of the broadcasting apparatus that fed the UN voice into older systems of communication to reach an international audience beyond its U.S. territory.

From the side galleries, journalists were always presented with a collective, decidedly formed and calibrated public sphere. To render the space equitable and the world malleable, the UN Conference officials instituted a lottery system for seat assignments, preventing delegates from affixing their place in the auditorium and by extension in the world, initially before each session and later weekly.27 Natalie de Blois and SOM placed cameras, filming crews, and radio broadcasters on the side galleries overlooking the entire floor, not solely the delegate presenting. In other words, these architects and U.S. Signal Corps engineers expanded the stage beyond the locale of the podium to also include the entire assembling body (Figure 3.3). In doing so, they delineated the floor as the site of representation of a world community at work.

By the time that the second part of the first session of the General Assembly was opening at Flushing Meadows, the transformation had registered at least with the U.S. press, which often referred to the UN as “the new world stage.”28 In the following years photographs and newsreels from the temporary headquarters circulated widely in newspapers and movie theaters, establishing the form of the new “world parliament” as a typology for future international institutions—or any institution with claims to globality. But the affinity of theatrical spaces with spectacles alarmed both diplomats and architects. A theater, a space where actors and actresses enact other voices and impersonate rather than represent, complicated and challenged ideas of free will and individualism, placing the diplomat within the context of a larger theater of international affairs. Therefore, the design problem for the permanent General Assembly became how to construct a stage that did not look like one, or put differently, how to obfuscate the theatrical ancestry of the plenary hall and to make space for a tempered and more intimate convening body.

The Acoustic Spaces of Internationalism

The question of plenary hall acoustics was not merely a technicality for acousticians, sound engineers, and architects to deal with. Techniques of listening and speaking determined the diplomatic cultures that the UN aspired to install within its public platforms. Acoustics dictated how a delegate’s voice would project onto space, but also how convening diplomats would perceive it: how loud or soft or reverberant that voice would be, as well as how it would reach its intended audience. At the same time, the Headquarters Planning Office had to incorporate simultaneous interpretation systems (see chapter 1) within the larger communications infrastructure to support the convening of an international body. On a certain level those decisions were technological, requiring technical expertise and equipment, but they also carried aesthetic and political implications, deriving from and determining diplomacy and international relations. Defining the acoustic conditions of diplomatic conversations accorded the planning of the General Assembly Hall—and to a certain extent the UN’s public platforms at large—an environmental dimension. Members of the Headquarters Planning Office and external consultants debated in terms of atmospheres and environmental aesthetics the selection of sound systems, the placement of broadcast studios, even the choice of simultaneous interpretation system to order the polyglot soundscape of the UN.

Reverberation presented a particularly pesky problem that brought forward the entanglement of aesthetics with politics. Hitler’s electoral campaigns had turned high reverberation rates into the sonic hallmark of the Third Reich, associating in the international public’s imagination resonant acoustic spaces and public address systems with the presence of undemocratic masses-as-publics. Loudspeakers reverberating in the open field established Hitler’s voice, leading his propaganda machine to radio-broadcast his voice echoing in space, rather than using the direct feed from the microphone or a speech reading recorded after the event.29 Loudspeakers aligned the Third Reich ideology with technological progress. Cornelia Epping-Jäger argues that the triad of sound technologies (microphones, loudspeakers, and amplifiers), ideology, and radiophonic structures of diffusion that made the “dispositive loud/speaker” were integral to the National Socialist propaganda machine, establishing the party’s “acoustic presence” by centering Hitler’s amplified and resonant voice-as-law.30

Yet the UN’s “dispositive loud/speaker” (to appropriate Epping-Jäger’s term), although not less ideological, aimed for a different affect. Directives against atmospheres that evoked “mass rallies” and calls for ways to reduce reverberation had already appeared during the London preparatory meetings, where officials lamented the choice of the echoing Central Hall.31 Noel-Baker, channeling the politicians’ reluctance regarding public address systems, suggested the replacement of loudspeakers with reflecting sounding boards that centered the Central Hall’s soundscape back to the body of the speaker.32 If resonance lay at the heart of the monumental soundscape of the Third Reich, then the UN should soften the voices of the new international organization, blunting their edges and tempering their differences. The voice on the podium should not be overpowering the delegates gathering inside the General Assembly. In the place of resonant public spheres, the UN called for an intimate atmosphere similar to the one that the “Fireside Chats” evoked during World War II, when FDR’s voice was brought inside U.S. households establishing the president as a paternal figure and domestic affairs as housekeeping.33 Reverberation was necessary for the voice to travel far enough, but needed to be adapted to the new call for clarity and intelligibility, rather than spectacle.

When Harrison formed the Board of Design in early 1947, its architects had to catch up with the acoustic concerns of delegates and UN Secretariat officials. A number of architects already working at the temporary headquarters at Flushing Meadows, Hunter College, and Lake Success (Walker and Skidmore, for example) were aware of the acoustic intricacies, but not all. Some of the Board architects persistently conflated parliaments with concert halls, revealing not only their inability to distinguish but probably also their desire to merge the two programs. The confusion between the two—concert halls and parliaments—had been evident since the time that Harrison, to demonstrate the appropriateness of the Turtle Bay site for the UN Headquarters, scrapped the titles “Metropolitan Opera” and “Philharmonic” from Zeckendorf’s X-City and penned in “General Assembly” and “Security Council,” sealing on the architectural plan what engineers and bureaucrats had already articulated inside the spaces momentarily hosting the UN: that the convening international body was to be staged in order to be constituted as a global public sphere (Figure 3.4).34 The conflation also demonstrated architects’ unfamiliarity with the specifics of architectural acoustics. Taking advantage of this inexperience, some Board architects criticized proposals on the grounds of their acoustic design to promote their own plans for the General Assembly, with Le Corbusier pointing to Gustave Lyon’s calculations for the League of Nations auditorium that he and Pierre Jeanneret had proposed, along with its architectural predecessor, the Salle Pleyel.35

The discussion that ensued revealed persisting anxieties over the capacity of the voice to even survive the large expanses of a monumental interior, but also resistance to the loudspeaker as an anti-acoustic technology.36 Board architects distinguished between first-order sounds to be amplified, interpreted, and circulated, and second-order sounds that they had to silence and insulate against. The clatter of typists, the rattle of heating and ventilation systems, as well as the throb of the city, were cast as “headquarters noise” against which the voice on the podium had to project.

Ambivalent toward technocratic formulations of the public sphere, Board architects also debated the need for electrical amplification and public address systems, with remarkably little consensus. Despite the fact that loudspeakers and microphones would secure the effective transmission of the voice on the podium to the convening body, they hesitated to admit sound systems into the Assembly Hall. Even the small minority of architects to consider an electroacoustic condition insisted that “good acoustics,” meaning architectural acoustics, would only help the scope of the sound system.37 “Many want [a] natural voice,” Harrison noted late in April 1947, echoing the general sentiment among UN officials who, although happy to indulge the machine metaphor when discussing the organization at large, were reluctant to allow it to articulate the UN public sphere.38 The desire for an unmediated voice of international liberalism to propagate the message of human rights, humanitarian relief, aid programs, and reconstruction was all too evident.

In its essence, the presence of technology undercut the fiction of a human-centric world community. Politicians shared their mistrust of technology in reports and questionnaires, complaining that microphones created noise and confusion. Part of the reason was that electronic amplification often distorted the voice of the speaker. There were also the technological glitches and performance anxiety associated with the use of microphones. Microphones and loudspeakers denaturalized the voice, standing there as a troublesome cue to the technological prosthesis at play. With electronic amplification, it was the loudspeaker that was speaking, or the headphone—not the politician. Sound systems ultimately disassociated speaking bodies from the voices that reached the audience, challenging any sense of control and mastery over one’s own voice (and by extension, self). UN delegates reporting to the Planning Office were also skeptical about wires and switches connecting speakers with the Secretariat infrastructural support, suggesting that verbatim reporters and simultaneous interpreters would be placed in physical proximity to the speaker so as to control communications without the interference of wires and cables.39 But in reality, at stake was the fear that microphones and loudspeakers subjugated the diplomatic body, surrendering its modulation to engineers and technology inside sound control booths, away from the speaking delegate’s body.

This was not a new problem in the history of parliamentary spaces. During the 1920s and 1930s, plenary halls and courtrooms from the International Palace of Justice to the Parliament of the United Kingdom had been retrofitted with microphones and loudspeakers in an effort to address inadequate acoustics. Most of the times press and delegates criticized those systems for distorting and alienating the speaking voice. Bidding for wiring the Palais de Chaillot that Jacques Carlu had been retrofitting for the sixth session of the UN General Assembly in 1951, Tannoy Products made a point out of its “natural” sounding sound systems.40 The company foregrounded its system’s ability to create the “illusion that no ‘Loudspeakers’ were being used,” where delegates appeared to talk “in a normal conversational voice,” as if “hearing not from an ‘Amplifying Loudspeaker,’ but from the orator himself with all his naturalness.”41 In short, the naturalness that Tannoy had in mind was normative in the sense that voices and the bodies producing them should coincide in space as if a whole system of wires, modulators, consoles, and in some cases interpreters, did not exist.

Tannoy had tried this approach at the House of Commons and the House of Lords, where the mounted microphones and built-in small loudspeakers promised to facilitate debates without threatening intelligibility or the intimate atmosphere of the two chambers. Wireless World, a Marconi publication dedicated to radio, described the House of Commons installation as a “softspeaker system,” where all members not only were able to hear, but also to be heard without having to speak from behind a podium (Figure 3.5).42 To adapt it for Church House, where the UN met in 1945, Tannoy replaced the loudspeaker system with headsets harnessed on the seats and a four-channel switch for simultaneous interpretation. The company reasoned that the headsets brought the speaker closer to listeners, literally bringing the voice on the podium to the ear of the delegate.43 In reality, however, Tannoy had replaced loudspeakers with headphones to avoid the howling feedback that occurs when microphones pick up sound from loudspeakers.

The call for intimacy constituted the biggest challenge, precisely because it ran against the very presence of loudspeakers. Delegates and diplomats built the UN public forums on the narrative of a shared aspiration and a desire for a new world based on rational and close relationships. Intimacy was central to that fantasy, initially as a response to the instrumentalized masses of the Third Reich, and later as a tool for political liberalism. Intimacy also implied an acoustic space dedicated to listening, to tending to the problems of the world. Dominic Pettman argues that “sonic intimacy,” the effort to install an acoustic space for introspection and connection, juxtaposes attempts at instituting a performative and outward-projecting “voice of the world.” Yet the UN General Assembly and its conversations on intimacy bid to merge the two to reconstitute the diplomatic sphere as a familial introspective smooth space.44 The UN, within this context, presents an interesting case, where bureaucrats and diplomats, invested in centering humanism within its platforms, sought to bring intimacy programmatically inside the institution with media and workshops, but ended up producing an aesthetic.

The Headquarters Planning Office insisted on hiding the very act of amplification, not only visually but also aurally. Harrison and Abramovitz thought that the ideal acoustic condition would allow the voice on the podium to reverberate without physical strain throughout the auditorium, avoiding, at the same time, reverberatory cacophony. Echoes, as much as they were a necessary byproduct of acoustic amplification, overlaid spoken words with their acoustic mirrors, ultimately destroying meaning and interfering with the very goal of communication. Rather, the two architects advocated for a relatively silenced General Assembly that could evoke a sense of comfort and warmth, while a loudspeaker system would take over the dissemination of the word on the podium.

The call for intimacy also registered on the visual level. Corridors and dramatic vistas that separated the speaker from the rest of the delegates produced distance and conveyed a stiff sense of decorum that diplomats shuddered at and were not willing to condone. Preparing the requirements for the General Assembly, delegates suggested eliminating side corridors, curving the edges of the auditorium desks, and bringing closer speaker and audience. “The tables should form a curve in front of the Speaker, the wings of which may not reach behind the level of the Speaker. . . . The principle of giving any speaker the feeling of having his audience gathered closely about him is more important than increased freedom of movement on the Assembly floor.” Architects would translate this desire for intimacy into lower ceilings, shorter corridors, a preference for carpets and wood, as well as curved walls. In a way, UN bureaucrats anticipated that the architecture of the UN General Assembly would endow the organization with a performative aesthetic of embrace.

The hesitation over electrical amplification revealed an additional tension between the desire for mass media to become conduits for the organization, and the overall distrust toward media. Ernest Weissmann, who at the time was the consultant architect to represent Yugoslavia, recognized the importance of broadcasting within the UN media apparatus, noting that the “architectural motive” behind the “UN Center” should be the public and how “to bring the deliberations of the nations’ delegates out of isolation to the people in the street.”45 Similarly, Le Corbusier called the media booths the “mechanical eyes and ears of the world,”46 a metaphor that he borrowed from Paramount and which Harrison swiftly adopted to press upon the Board the representational value those spaces would carry. The whole world would be watching the public platforms the architects designed for the UN.47

During Board meetings, visiting UN diplomats reminded architects that part of their job was to frame the perspective of mass media. “The press should see the entire floor,” Vaughan proclaimed.48 Following the recommendation of sound engineers and broadcast specialists, the Headquarters Planning Office asked architects to consider sightlines in their placement of the press booths in all council chambers and meeting halls.49 Officials requested a booth for “long shots” to dramatically cover the proceedings of the General Assembly.50

Dimitri Manouilsky, a Ukrainian diplomat in the USSR’s delegation, urged UN officials to adopt the IBM system at the time installed at Courtroom 600 for the Nuremberg Trials, a proposal that raised concerns among delegates and interpreters alike. The Board architects also had opinions about the interpretation system. Le Corbusier condemned the coupling of orators with microphones and the replacement of the “human voice” with the “mechanical interpreter” for disrupting what he perceived to be an intimate connection between speaker and audience. In his mind, the interpreters’ exemption from the plenary field denied them humanity and rendered them machines. “But no, gentlemen, a mechanical voice speaks to a field of dead people,” he claimed, appealing to the architects’ conflicting sentiments toward the electrification of the human voice.51

The press, on the other hand, celebrated the simultaneous interpretation system as a big technological aid to international diplomacy. The Binghamton Sun proclaimed the wireless radio simultaneous interpretation headset that IBM installed at Lake Success and Flushing Meadows a most impactful “little gadget” for “international understanding,” especially for paying timely attention to “the force of many arguments” that otherwise would be lost in translation within the “babble of tongues” (Figure 3.6). In arguing so, the newspaper obliterated the interpreters and celebrated the device as the system itself.52 The initial proposal to recycle the same units for the permanent headquarters caused protest from competing companies.53 As a result, the Headquarters Planning Office allowed IBM to bid only for the channel selectors, the cables, and some of the headphones, which opened the door to more competitors including Siemens, Philips, and Telex.54

The booths for the interpreters placed additional demands on the Board architects. The Nuremberg Trials setup next to the witness stand was inconvenient for prohibiting eye contact with each speaker on the podium. The open glass booths at the rear side of the temporary headquarters in Lake Success admitted environmental noise inside the booth, interfering with the interpreters’ listening. Architects decided to place those booths, along with the rest of the media infrastructures, inside galleries behind a unifying double glass, ultimately embedding them on the walls and having them overlook the entire floor.55

With the simultaneous interpreters removed from the floor and placed alongside the rest of infrastructural support—journalists, cameramen, and radio producers—the UN demonstrated its desire to produce the convening public as an uninterrupted functioning whole. All interpretations would reach delegates via wires and headphones. Everything else would be background noise, rendering the existence of loudspeakers superfluous to the operations of the General Assembly. Delegates could tune in and out of speeches, choosing the language channel of their preference. The global polity congregating at the center did not share the same acoustic space, but rather acquired an atomized experience of the assembly. In this sense, the acoustic space they inhabited was built around the individual, creating, nonetheless, an intimate acoustic relationship with the interpreter at work. Each member related directly with the larger communication organism and not to one another, illuminating the organization’s aspiration to insert itself as the interfacing system. Amplification was purely ornamental, enveloping the convening body in the voice projecting into space.

Architectures of Sound Control

Following the conclusion of the Board of Design meetings, the Headquarters Planning Office set out to identify acousticians to work on the headquarters. The Office initially offered the project to UCLA professor Vern O. Knudsen, co-founder of the Acoustical Society of America and a prominent acoustician in the United States.56 Knudsen, who had been researching speech in auditoriums, believed acoustic design to be the management of variables and argued that plenary halls and spaces designed for the spoken word required a lower reverberation rate and the elimination of noise to render speech intelligible.57

For the UN, Knudsen compiled a comprehensive study of assembly halls and courtrooms in Europe, creating a map of auditory conditions. He visited the Palais des Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the Palais de Chaillot, where the General Assembly was temporarily convening at the time, and declared the acoustics of all three rooms substandard: the Palais des Nations had “frightfully reverberant” lobbies, with echoes fluttering inside the General Assembly Hall; the International Court of Justice was “excessively reverberant and noisy” with the installed Philips amplification system helping, but not remedying, the room acoustics; and the Palais de Chaillot, although satisfying acoustically given its refurbishment by Jacques Carlu, had a defective simultaneous interpretation system that did not insulate the interpreters against environmental noise.58 In the report Knudsen noted that apart from interfering with speech intelligibility, high reverberation created a sense of monumentality. To control both, he recommended that the Headquarters Planning Office additionally insulate the General Assembly and any broadcast booths adjacent to the main plenary hall.

When Knudsen resigned from the UN project on account of his teaching responsibilities at UCLA, he recommended one of his students for the job: the much younger acoustics researcher and architect Richard Bolt.59 Bolt, who at the time was teaching at MIT, invited his colleague Leo L. Beranek to work with him on the UN Headquarters early in October 1948. Beranek, who had just moved from Harvard to MIT to teach communication engineering and oversee the interdepartmental Acoustics Laboratory, was awestruck.60 “I hate to say it but we really didn’t know anything. The first time Bolt unrolled those blueprints for the U.N. headquarters that had already been developed, they covered the whole floor of the room. . . . It was frightening,” he recalled in his autobiography.61 From 1948 to 1951, Bolt and Beranek reviewed the acoustic design of the headquarters, with Beranek planning in addition the sound system for the General Assembly. Young architect Robert B. Newman joined the team later in 1948, eventually becoming a partner. The project spurred them to form the acoustic consultancy Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a consultancy that later pioneered time-sharing systems, research on machine-human symbiosis, and eventually the computer network known as ARPANET, a progenitor of the Internet.62

Hired for their background in architectural acoustics (Bolt had a BA in architecture), Bolt and Beranek did not fail to notice immediately that intelligibility was the main acoustic problem they would have to address. In other words, the two engineers, like Knudsen earlier, noted that for the diplomatic voice-as-signal to be deployed within the UN, acoustic design had to ensure its intelligibility to all listeners regardless of medium of transmission (wires and air). The screech of audio feedback, distortion, muffled sound, or even jumbled signals made apparent the presence of an electroacoustic system that organized the voice of the world, albeit disrupting ideas of organic unity and frictionless communication within the international community. The completion of the communication loop depended on the environmental conditions against which the projected sound traveled. Cafeterias, lounges, corridors, as well as meeting rooms and chambers presented plenty of threats to the intelligibility of diplomatic exchanges. In this sense, the potential failure of the UN communication apparatus was as much a technological as it was a political question.

The idea of noise as a threat to communication has a military past. Bolt, and especially Beranek, had been steeped in research on telecommunication systems and speech intelligibility since early in World War II, when noise complaints from the Air Corps reached the U.S. National Defense Committee (NDC). Signals were failing to reach their targets; pilots were reporting noise fatigue; and signalmen could hardly comprehend commands amid action. Convinced that noise was the source of the problem, the U.S. National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) launched a research initiative on the soundproofing of long-range bombardments, examining noise as both a mechanical and psychological problem.63 Noise did not only affect aircraft, but also tank, submarine, and ship communications systems—in short, a much wider variety of combat vehicles. Two Harvard laboratories, one centered around Beranek and dedicated to the “quieting” of aircraft noise, the Electro-Acoustic Laboratory (EAL), and the other centered around psychologist Stanley S. Stevens and Medical School physiologist Hallowell Davis and researching psychological factors in communications, the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory (PAL), set out to study human performance under “intense sound fields.”64 The two labs, operating from the basement of Memorial Hall (PAL) and the Cruft Laboratory (EAL), decidedly placed military communications at the intersection of acoustics, electrical engineering, and psychology.65 But most importantly, the two laboratories reframed communications as a question of “sound control,” rather than acoustics, with Philip Morse pronouncing them a core research center for work on communications at large, equal in significance to Bell Labs.66

Initial experiments inside the highly reverberant boiler room of the Memorial Hall basement at Harvard had conscientious objectors coordinating, targeting, sorting, and coding in noise and quiet.67 The experiments showed that noise, contrary to popular belief, did not fatigue the pilots, but rather interfered with communications—the ability to receive, comprehend, and deliver information—thus impairing ground, air, and sea operations.68 The discovery recentered aircraft research around sound control and the articulation of the spoken word. The two laboratories tested and calibrated communications systems for the U.S. Signal Corps, the Air Corps, and the Navy. Articulation tests helped the labs to test communication systems, while research on microphones and headsets showed that silence and low reverberation rates promoted speech intelligibility and noise impaired it.

To calibrate military communication systems, the young engineers developed a “dead room,” a new type of laboratory architecture to measure instruments and test articulation. “Dead rooms” had been the foundational facility for any research on noise and sound control since the mid-1930s, although they tended to come in a variety of shapes and forms. As Henning Schmidgen explains, the camera silenta, often presenting as a box within a box, an insulated room within a larger institutional infrastructure, emerged in the early twentieth century as a research medium for psychologists who looked for ways to isolate their subjects from distracting noise. Yet those acoustically dead rooms depended on a web of telecommunications that reconstructed tested subjects as flows of information connected via telephones or clocks.69

EAL was working with some models in mind.70 By the time Beranek set out to equip Harvard with one, Bell Telephone Laboratories had already built a “dead room” and Erwin Meyer had pioneered the use of wedges to wide acclaim within the acoustics community.71 Meyer’s solution impressed Beranek for its acoustic properties and high absorbance, but also for its dramatic appearance. The “acoustical stalagmites and stalactites projecting from the walls, ceiling and floor” offered Meyer’s dead room the presentation of a subterranean cave, distinctive enough to become an iconic laboratory space.72 To that end, Beranek rebranded Meyer’s room as his own invention, baptizing the new laboratory space that Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch & Abbott built for EAL an “anechoic chamber”—meaning a room so absorptive that no echoes or reverberation could exist (Figures 3.7 and 3.8).73 The chamber photographed well and quickly became an iconic space for communications systems and modern acoustics that nonetheless was demolished to make space for the Science Center, which opened its doors in 1972. Visitors at the anechoic chamber felt profoundly disoriented, with their words and the sounds of their moving bodies being absorbed by the wedged walls. Inside an anechoic chamber there was no echo to reassure visitors of their own existence and standing in the world. “People speak with lifeless voices” and “talking demands a conscious effort,” noted the Boston Sunday Post.74

Beranek’s anechoic chamber illustrated the complexity of acoustic control in interior spaces (Figure 3.9). To eliminate echoes, a condition found at open fields, the chamber had to be completely sealed. Yet, to admit humans inside the anechoic chamber required the renewal of air, with a continuous or intermittent airflow. To completely seal the chamber against both exterior and interior noise, contractors removed any mechanical support systems and any sound control rooms outside the chamber. The team also engineered two soundproofed doors to act as a “sound lock” against exterior noise, concocting a plug made of fiberglass wedges to isolate the AC unit when not in use.75

For the design of the General Assembly, Beranek brought this military understanding of the space of communications within the headquarters. Similarly to the cockpits he was researching for the Air Force, the General Assembly would become a completely controlled environment, an insulated box within a box, connected to an ever-expanding network of institutions and field stations. The first report that Bolt issued in collaboration with Beranek practically reconstituted the General Assembly as an anechoic chamber. Bolt argued that soundproofing was the foundational condition of communication and advised the Headquarters Planning Office to plan “based on the assumption that all the functions can best be carried on in a very quiet and highly deadened space,” especially for the General Assembly, where speeches were to be recorded, interpreted, transcribed, transmitted, and projected in space.76 In this sense, the General Assembly would need to be deadened to communicate with its audiences.

The two acousticians put forward a silencing plan. Subway vibrations, sprinklers, typewriters, noisy lobbies, plumbing, and air-conditioning systems potentially threatened the acoustic sanctity of the plenary hall and the rest of the forums within the headquarters.77 “We potentially had noise between rooms which required noise reduction. We had ventilating system noise. We had rooms that were shaped impossibly. The whole project was scary as the dickens,” Beranek recalled.78 To achieve the controlled environment of the anechoic chamber, they soundproofed the General Assembly against the mechanical infrastructure and ventilation systems, but the air conditioning systems continued undermining the acoustic seal. “In the first place, we didn’t know how much noise fans made, and we didn’t know what the criteria were that you design against; how quiet did the room have to be? So, how much did you have to cut the noise down? The only thing that was known was if you used ducts and lined them, you’d get so many decibels reduction per length of lined duct,” noted Beranek.79 Regardless of BBN’s surprise, the noise of mechanical systems had been a known problem in the entertainment industry since the introduction of air-conditioning systems in film production plants and broadcast studios. As Joseph Siry demonstrates, those environments required relative silence to control the signals picked up by microphones.80 To solve the problem, Bolt and Beranek measured the sound levels of ventilation systems at the General Motors Laboratories and the Sears, Roebuck and Company store, evaluating their performance for noise.81

But mechanical noise was not the only problem. Systems of continuous airflow often resulted in cross-talking and sound transmission, which undermined the purported sound control inside the UN’s platforms. To reduce unwanted transmission, BBN designed sound traps for ducts, nozzles, and fans.82 Insulating against the air-conditioning system proved a nightmare and Bolt and Beranek strongly opposed Sven Markelius’s and Finn Juhl’s plans to expose council chamber ductwork in any structural way, suggesting the complete encasement of the whole infrastructure out of sight.83 In addition, two sets of double doors on the rear side of the auditorium further insulated the General Assembly from the surrounding corridors, especially the noise of the foyer; celotex and cork absorbed the steps and voices of the advisers in the auditorium; and soundproofing around ventilation ducts eliminated vibrations and noise from the air-conditioning system. Bolt and Beranek insulated the interpretation booths against noise, as well as the booths for radio broadcasters and film crews, and suggested the installation of floating desks to reduce traveling vibrations.

But the two engineers did not limit their work to soundproofing. They noted that parallel walls resulted in flutter echoes and standing waves, creating dead spots and limiting the distribution of the projecting voice. They proposed the installation of “echo rooms” with double splayed windows, sloped walls, and curved surfaces, all solutions found in architectural acoustics treatises.84 However, any suggestions that the Headquarters Planning Office deemed architectural met with unyielding opposition. A “straight wall not only looks better but would be simpler to build if it is acceptable to you,” wrote architect and Headquarters Planning Office assistant director Michael M. Harris in an effort to dissuade them from architectural solutions.85 The Office maintained that all visual matters fell under the supervision of architects and designers, not acousticians.

For BBN the main problem with the acoustic design of the General Assembly auditorium was its constitution as an open field. “The character of this space . . . poses a problem which is more nearly one of outdoor acoustics than one of enclosed auditorium acoustics,” they noted. In their mind, regardless of architects’ efforts to institute the General Assembly as an intimate sphere, the space was acoustically “monumental,” and only a public address system would solve the problem of scale. Meanwhile Harrison was asking BBN to undo acoustically the scale of the interior (Figure 3.10).86 Since architectural acoustic solutions were not on the table, the three engineers turned to sound control, effectively transforming the General Assembly into a “cockpit” from which to connect and order the world. Within this context, the General Assembly should be silenced so that sound would reach loudspeakers, headphones, interpretation booths, recording stations and broadcasting studios without noise. The additional benefit to this thorough soundproofing was the overall reduction of reverberation to acoustically disguise the scale of the plenary hall. In this process of diffusion, architectural amplification was superfluous.

With loudspeakers being the de facto means of amplification, the engineers shifted their attention to placement, determining the spatial relationship of the delegate speaking to the sound emanating from the loudspeakers. BBN wanted to celebrate the presence of loudspeakers, initially proposing mounting a set from the ceiling within an acoustically transparent globe speaking back to the delegates as the voice of the world.87 Harrison opposed the proposal for reconstructing the spoken word of international politics as a transcendental experience and the voice of the delegates as almost divine. Amplification, the endowment of the body with tools to exceed its own limitations, was not to be evidently celebrated in an organization recentering publics around a new humanism. Instead, and to the horror of BBN, Harrison asked for more realism, suggesting a loudspeaker placement found at the time in movie theaters, with the voice emanating from the direction of the podium and toward the convening body, a suggestion that the team was pushed to follow (Figure 3.11).

To naturalize the presence of technology requires additional technique. Pairing microphones with loudspeakers facing one another was a recipe for a distorting feedback loop. In response, BBN placed the main loudspeaker in a soundproof container filled with fiberglass wedges, similar to those developed for the anechoic chamber.88 They recommended a highly directional microphone that could separate the voice of the speaker from the background noise, a technology that Altec Lansing, a company specializing in high-fidelity sound systems, had been advertising (Figure 3.12).89 Regardless of calls for a multipurpose use of the plenary hall as a concert hall, BBN advised against it, arguing that the two programs carried fundamentally different acoustic requirements: optimum concert hall acoustics demanded higher reverberation rates and the diffusion of sound, while parliament and plenary hall acoustics required sound absorption and accentuation of the directionality of speech.

The position of the main loudspeaker group, however, carried symbolic value. “The speaker’s voice should appear to come from the region in which the speaker is standing,” a memorandum noted.90 To maintain the directionality of speech, the team would have to place the loudspeaker behind the podium and rostrum, on a wall that the Headquarters Planning Office had imagined adorned with seals of the member states framing the speaker (Figure 3.13). In the middle of this rostrum the UN emblem provided a focal point (Figure 3.14). Covering landmasses with wire mesh and oceans with fabric, BBN transformed the emblem into the point of projection, the core of the UN soundscape, from which the voice of the delegates would emanate as the voice of the world.91 To reinforce the feeling of immediacy, the team furnished the podium with an additional loudspeaker to accentuate the directionality and reaffirm that the voice was actually originating from the speaking body present in front of the rostrum. The sound system completed the simulacrum of media transparency, realism, and global democracy. The “intimate public” that UN officials asked for would be the product of thorough soundproofing and the tight assembling of delegates, with headsets, microphones, interpreters, and control rooms. The “natural” voice of the speaking delegate, once it traveled through the wires and mouths of interpreters, would project onto space through an icon of the new world system and its hegemonic structures. The public forum was to be a modulated and modulating space.

UN Broadcasts

Meanwhile, the audiences that the plenary hall could not include, mass media would reach. The Headquarters Planning Office expected that the voices projected within the headquarters would feed—either in the form of recordings or text, and at times in the company of visuals—a larger communication infrastructure reaching publics around the world, hence transforming any localized concern into a matter of global interest. At least since San Francisco, the developing organization had aspired to have mass media perform a political function that would enlarge the UN’s audience, based on a belief that the circulation of information alone would bring about an internationalist spirit. Architecture would need to formalize in space these media expectations.

The United Nations Information Organization (UNIO), the Allied powers’ press clearinghouse for news on different war fronts that had helped build bridges among the various national media conglomerates, had already set the tone for the possible institutional forms that such an information division could take. The League of Nations, the precursor to the UN, had featured an Information Section that facilitated the dissemination of policies and recommendations decided in Geneva directly to the governments of member states. Following this path, the United Nations Headquarters offered a new opportunity to determine the organization’s broadcast architecture.

Information and broadcasting had been thoroughly discussed during the meetings of the Preparatory Commission, which had appointed a Technical Advisory Committee on Information to present recommendations to the first General Assembly in London. Adriaan Pelt, the Dutch journalist who had served as Director of the Information Section at the League of Nations and had led the Netherlands’ Information Bureau, proposed a distinct Information Section to organize the distribution of news and the organization’s public relations, at the same time that he also advocated for more robust radio, film, and exhibition departments.92 “It is difficult to imagine an international organization without a radio station of its own,” he noted, and added that a “modern information section should have, as already pointed out, a less official and formal character than did the League.”93 The General Assembly ratified the recommendation for a new Department of Public Information (DPI) in its first session and launched a Committee on Communications that brought together Signal Corps engineers, television and radio technicians, directors, acousticians, and communication engineers to plan the United Nations’ communications infrastructure and its outreach.94

In many ways, the DPI followed the institutional structure of its immediate predecessor, UNIO. Housed within the UN Secretariat, DPI was tasked with advertising the work of the organization, educating the public (as official press releases claimed) and, at the same time, providing access to critical information for journalists and other UN missions, a mandate that, according to Barbara Crossette, compromised the integrity of the division, since the charge to propagandize and the charge for informational transparency were in essence antithetical.95 New publications, in particular the United Nations Review and the United Nations Yearbook, would both archive and circulate news about the organization.96 Documentary films and exhibitions could circumvent the problem of language, with the goal of making “the Organization real to large segments of the public.”97 Its film and visual information division would produce, often in collaboration with the film industry, newsreels and documentaries to feed in cinemas around the world. In addition, DPI featured a “public relations” division to actively cultivate relationships with distributors and national press representatives, but also to explicitly target schools, colleges, churches, clubs, women’s group, as well as nongovernmental organizations and media networks.98 There was also the metaphorical “broadcasting” of the organization itself, seeding the world with regional field offices that served as its ears and mouth. By 1968 there were forty-nine United Nations Information Centers covering more than a hundred countries, with a special focus on regions with scarce communications infrastructure, and the directive to collect and report back to the headquarters information about them as well.99 By producing and promoting its own programming, DPI allowed the UN to control the message and image of the organization, as well as its representation.

To secure the UN’s positive disposition toward communications technologies and mass media, crucial institutional positions went to high-ranking officials with experience either in the League of Nations Information Section or with American broadcast networks. For example, Byron Price, former member of both United Press and the Associated Press, Vice President of the Motion Picture Association of America, and later Assistant to the Secretary-General at the United Nations, took over the Department of Administrative and Financial Services that managed budgets. Price, who had helped Roosevelt negotiate wartime censorship against the constitutional freedom of the press, oversaw budgetary concerns particularly with an eye toward the organization’s public relations, which proved invaluable as the need for budgetary reform often endangered DPI and its operations.100

DPI officials doubled down on broadcasting the work of the organization, hoping that the dissemination of information and news from different parts of the world would create a sense of community with shared values and goals, but also that radio first (and television later) would allow the UN to circumvent national governments and build a “direct” international audience (Figure 3.15). The first Assistant Secretary-General to lead DPI, Benjamin Cohen, confirmed the instrumental role of radio emphatically:

But it is essential for the United Nations to build up a direct audience. It is a collectivity, not merely a group of fifty-one separate nations. As a collectivity, it has its own responsibility to make its voice heard throughout the world. Unless it can develop and maintain permanent contact with world opinion it will be powerless in time of crisis.101

In order to achieve world coverage, the UN sought out radio and telecommunications engineers who had set up and maintained Radio Nations, the League of Nations broadcasting station. In most cases, those engineers had acquired their expertise installing colonial telecommunications infrastructures that tied peripheries to metropolises. Gijsbert Frans van Dissel, the Dutch engineer who was heading the efforts to determine requirements for a UN Radio, had served as Head Manager of the Government Radio Service in the Dutch East Indies and later on as a member of the League of Nations Communications and Transit Section.102 In his general recommendations, Van Dissel proposed a “broadcasting service of a world wide character” that would cover the territories of member states, as well as offer point-to-point services among the permanent members of the Security Council (in his draft initially referred to as the “four big Powers”) and another point-to-point service with national broadcasters so as to secure the further dissemination of footage produced at the Headquarters.103

Setting up an operative radio station in the Headquarters would not be a problem, but broadcasting was, particularly since it required a technical infrastructure that spanned different countries’ legal systems and national telecommunications networks. Conditions of sovereignty extended to the airwaves, making any attempt to acquire a dedicated bandwidth a matter of intergovernmental negotiations. Before World War II, national radio stations could register the wavelengths of their choice with the International Telecommunication Union, an organization invited to partake in the UN assembly as an invested regulatory body. As a result, by the time that the UN petitioned certain wavelengths for its own stations, there was no airwave space left for use. The Transport and Communications Commission of the Economic and Social Council suggested that the International Telecommunication Union hold a conference on the system for distributing frequencies. As part of the negotiations with the United States on the extraterritorial status of the headquarters site, they also asked for the right to use airwaves that were originally assigned to U.S. radio broadcasters.104

Engineers debated the structure of radio broadcasting as well, particularly in terms of outreach. For shortwave broadcasting, the UN acquired the frequencies originally registered with the Bern Bureau for Radio Nations, but shortwave broadcasting offered lower sound clarity and was less appealing to general audiences.105 FM radio guaranteed better sound but required a relay system of transmitters and the cooperation of national networks, and neither the United States nor any other member country were willing to make space for it on their airwaves. In addition, one single transmitter would not solve the problem of global broadcast. In fact, General Frank E. Stoner, who suggested a system of relay broadcasting and close collaboration with local FM radio stations, advised the UN toward more flexibility and less focus on infrastructure.106 By early September 1946, an interdepartmental unit for radio communications headed by Pelt, Stoner, and Van Dissel came up with a redistribution of frequencies plan for “une veritable ceinture mondiale,” a suggestion that did not, however, materialize.107 The only viable solution was to delegate broadcasting to national and private networks until at some later point the economic and political conditions would allow for an independent global radio network. The decision to delegate broadcasting turned DPI’s attention to programming and production. The UN Headquarters would produce content that national networks could then use, hence disseminating recommendations or news about the UN.

To determine the spatial and technical needs of radio and film production, the Headquarters Planning Office looked into the design and construction of broadcasting and filming studios, at the time celebrated for their modernist typology (Figure 3.16). The first session of the General Assembly in London offered some insights. In London, the BBC had equipped Central Hall with staff, equipment, and studio space, broadcasting the proceedings far and wide with the hopes of enabling a global participation of “the peoples” (at least as “listeners”).108 Building on the World Service’s growing reach that, under the name “Empire Service,” had once connected deployed settlers, expats, and local elites against anti-colonial upheavals across the British Empire,109 the UN hoped to similarly fabricate its own imagined world community with UN Radio.110 BBC engineers and technicians built broadcasting facilities that they rented out to commercial and national broadcasting companies, setting the standards for technical needs and global coverage.111

At Hunter College later in spring of 1946, a two-story tower of stacked broadcast studios behind soundproof glass appeared at the corner of the old gym where the UN Security Council convened in front of an acoustic splayed wall, not only emulating the control rooms in the corners of soundstages overlooking the filming of talkies, but also demonstrating the transformation of Council Chambers and Assembly Halls into studios for recording and diffusing conversations. Similarly, a year later at Lake Success, Ralph Walker furnished the new location of the Security Council with soundproofed studio booths for filming and radio (Figure 3.17). Radio was instrumental in broadening the UN’s audience beyond a very limited governing elite, scaling up and widening the territories and communities that DPI covered.112 Film, and in particular the Hollywood film industry, contrived to shape public opinion around the role of the UN in the international scene.113 But television would eventually become the main medium through which the UN would establish the image of its public forums.

The seeds for globally televising UN meetings had been planted at Flushing Meadows when the Conference Division introduced television sets into an overflow lounge space (Figure 3.18).114 Within the UN, television provided a convenient transmission technology and allowed for a vision of televised proceedings to linger a bit longer, regardless of earlier hesitations that images hindered the public’s imagination. Maybe resonating with what Doron Galili identifies to be the vested interest of broadcast networks in technologies of moving image transmission, DPI placed the responsibility for television under broadcast and not film.115 On October 10, 1946, the Television Broadcasters Association Convention presented Secretary-General Trygve Lie with a scroll pledging the entertainment industry’s support of the United Nations in its outreach programs.116 Instead, the UN proposed to supply recordings and kinescopes (filmed televised images) for distribution through media networks. In equipping these halls for broadcasts by both radio and television (even if initially for internal use), the UN reconfigured its public platforms as production sets. Equipment and furniture loans—the seats inside the Flushing Meadows site were dispatched from the Paramount Theater—solidified the constitution of those spaces as studios.

The Board architects perceived studios as essential components of the apparatus they were setting up for the UN. Photographs and articles on the architecture of broadcast studios, presenting detailed equipment and architectural requirements, as well as design problems and possible solutions, had been circulating the architectural press since the 1930s.117 NBC’s broadcasting studios often appeared as models in journals such as Architectural Forum and Architectural Record, introducing architects to the radio program and building type.118 In fact, the Board of Design had been convening in proximity to the Radio City broadcasting studios that Corbett Harrison and MacMurray, along with J. André Fouilhoux and Raymond Hood, had designed for the Rockefeller Center, visiting them to comprehend the programmatic needs of such spaces. The air-conditioned NBC studios had opened their doors to wide acclaim, presenting a useful example of how to negotiate the technical requirements of broadcasting with the spatial demands for the admittance of audiences.119 The moving panels that isolated NBC audiences from the stage allowed studios to remain flexible to the shifting demands of radio programming. Acoustics was particularly important to this new architecture that centered on the spoken word and the voice-as-signal. Emily Thompson shows how intelligibility within the world of broadcast studios and soundstages prompted sound engineers to develop methods of insulating so as to reduce reverberation times, even structurally isolating soundstages and control rooms to avoid the travel of vibrations.120 For example, lighting consultant Henry L. Logan of the Holophane Company had designed embedded lighting fixtures for the ceilings to allow for the additional acoustic control of the studios.

The Headquarters Planning Office actively sought out the expertise of network representatives and engineers, as well as the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), but it also consulted smaller independent stations such as WNEW. The goal was to determine how the introduction of studios and broadcasting technology would transform the UN’s Headquarters at large.121 Board architects also visited the studios set up inside Flushing Meadows and Lake Success, where the CBC and BBC shared booths for the coverage of the General Assembly and the Security Council respectively (an experience that led the two national broadcast companies to ask for separate accommodations in the permanent headquarters, to no avail).122 Laboring to distinguish the formalized public sphere of diplomats on the floor from its support systems of media, they found Natalie de Blois’s Flushing Meadows configuration to be a useful model for the design of the permanent General Assembly.123 During visits to Lake Success, the Planning Office criticized the booths around the Security Council for not offering a full view of the delegates at the table, while finding the radio booths sufficient.124 While finalizing the plans, the architects channeled the lesson of broadcast studios in their configuration of the General Assembly and the Security Council Chamber as broadcasting studios.125 In the end, the interiors of Council Chambers and the General Assembly more and more resembled the studios of broadcast and television networks, with booths arranged on the sides to produce and transmit what was happening on stage.

UN broadcasts, however, encountered an aggregation of obstacles, from local networks burying UN programming in off-peak slots to technical issues such as poor signal quality.126 An effort to establish an amateur radio station—a proposal pioneered by General Stoner—did not take off. Without a transmitter of its own, UN Radio relied on the “Voice of America” and other networks and agencies, limiting reception in many parts of the world. An Expert Committee suggested in response the production of fifteen-minute broadcasts during the annual meetings of the General Assembly (when demand was guaranteed) and weekly programs the rest of the year. When later, on account of low demand and budgetary restructuring, the committee suggested that the UN should relay only on demand, DPI rebelled against the recommendation, arguing that a market-driven definition of programming would curtail the main goal of the organization: to reach an international collective despite the disposition of local governments and their media. Some of the committee members recommended the termination of live broadcasts, but the other half resisted, arguing that they allowed the international community to “share in the proceedings,” enabling journalists and officials to follow the deliberations and conversations.127

Although the UN anticipated that television would enter the headquarters eventually, committee after committee abandoned the plan for an independent television station, especially since kinescoped newsreels and radio broadcasting seemed to satisfy the demand for news. After 1957, amid a push for financial reform of the organization, the Expert Committee assigned with the task of evaluating DPI (at that time called the Office of Public Information) proposed that the UN refocus its energies on programming, rather than infrastructure.128 The focus of the Radio Division shifted from the dissemination of information at large to broadcasting to the decolonizing world. As a result, DPI encouraged UN officials to invest in developing media content, solidifying the institution’s dependence on national and private broadcast companies and telecommunications organizations.129

In its official publications, the UN Department of Public Information reiterated the central role that mass media would play for the organization. “The rooms are stages on which—by means of all the mass media of communication such as television, radio, motion pictures and the press—the Public may view the activities of its representatives,” explained the journal Your United Nations.130 This interfacing of mass media and international organization prompted conversations on media systems for global coverage. Walter Duschinsky, who worked on the telecommunications systems at the headquarters, anticipated a “global television system” to address national and international territories. He declared television a “tremendous medium” capable of being utilized to bring “good will in world relations,”131 while claiming that “communication centers [were] expressions of the character of the age” and architecture the instrument to organize these neocolonial aspirations of media technologies.132 That being said, television would take on, and in this sense continue, the work of newsreels in presenting images of the UN’s formed publics to the world.

Radio, however, centered the voice and its materiality in the planning for the headquarters (and any subsequent platforms the UN would engineer). In assembling humans and machines in networks circulating information, the UN opened its public spheres to the workings of communications, introducing communication engineering to the political configuration of the postwar global community. To address the voice-as-signal that claimed from the podium to be of and for the world, the Board architects turned to communications engineering, ultimately transforming the UN’s global interiors into broadcast studios for global diplomacy. Acousticians reconfigured acoustic problems to questions of electroacoustic communications, bringing inside the space of international organization war epistemologies that intertwined diplomacy with military engineering.

Following the inauguration of the UN, MIT Professor Karl W. Deutsch argued that government is not just a political problem but rather a problem of “steering” in the cybernetics sense, hence belonging to discussions of “communication and decision.” In his book The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control, Deutsch, previously a member of OSS and a participant in the San Francisco Conference, attempted a cybernetic political theory that claimed the “governing of human organizations” to be similar to the governing of machines.133 His assertion resonated with a general effort to re-culture the cybernetic program that had emerged from military research for the post–World War II political and social realms. But also, as the planning of the United Nations Headquarters shows, the grounds for such an epistemic transference never quite constituted a straightforward affair. The presence of interpreters at the General Assembly, for example, problematized the idea of prosthesis as an exclusively technological one. The prosthetic part in the UN’s interpretation system was not a machine, but rather a human being. As Deutsch noted, communication was “social” before becoming “technological.” Actually, it was the “division of intellectual labor” that preceded and even produced the division between “human minds and an ever growing array of electronic or other communications.”134

To counterbalance endemic machine metaphors, fears of technological takeover, and allusions to totalitarian regimes, UN delegates urged the Planning Office to foreground intimacy in the planning of its public spaces. In this sense, the UN delegates appeared to believe what architects already understood very well: that the habitus of this new multilateral organization, the way its space was organized and experienced, was as central to the appearance of the new world order as any other legal and bureaucratic framework. The simulacrum of global governance as an intimate and informal affair was as much an architectural business as it was an engineering and acoustic one. Intimacy, or at least its architectural and acoustic illusion, promised to shape, if not transform, the new public spheres of internationalism and present them as global and democratic. At the same time, this illusion of intimacy proved instrumental for the organization, particularly for claiming a direct relationship with the people who comprised its publics outside its immediate environments, while reproducing economic and political asymmetries on the background.