Itinerant Platforms

In a footnote on the design history of the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, Chris Pearson refers to an unusual incident. The UNESCO House, as it was known at the time, was the second UN–affiliated building to open after the completion of the UN Headquarters in New York City, and maybe the first to absorb the lessons of its construction and management. Tired of how ill-lit the Executive Board Room was, UNESCO officials asked Marcel Breuer and Bernard Zehrfuss to find a solution and bring more natural light in. Zehrfuss and Breuer were hesitant to puncture solid walls to install windows, but Philip Johnson, whose office had undertaken the interior design, shrugged nonchalantly in response: “It makes no difference to me, it is entirely up to you. Good luck!”1 Maybe this is an all-too-common exchange between an architect and a client for a small private project, but for an international institution, whose recently completed headquarters carried the weight and promise of global and infinite scientific and cultural exchange, the architect’s indifference was surprising. It is possible that Johnson’s office was focusing on other projects at the time, or that Johnson was disinterested in the project of cultural internationalism, and therefore ascribed little value to his office’s contribution. But maybe at play was a much more complex give-and-take between architectural claims to authorship and the making of global interiors for international institutions.

The Executive Board Room was one of eight chambers that member states had donated to UNESCO. Gifting interiors to international institutions was at the time an established practice and a smart budgetary tool that allowed member states to appear in the global space of the headquarters and claim to frame its public spheres in exchange for funding the completion of the project. Following the example of the Scandinavian gifts that had furnished the three council chambers at the UN Headquarters, the U.S. government, with the help of the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art, had sponsored the Executive Board Room and commissioned its design to Philip Johnson Associates (Figure E.1).2 But, in the same way that the setting of tables, media booths, auditoriums, and chairs inside the UN’s council chambers had already been determined in the master plan of the UN Headquarters, those rooms had been pre-decided outside the architectural office (Figure E.2, E.3). In actuality, the structural relationships of the UNESCO House rooms had been resolved back in New York City, where architects, engineers, and acousticians had given the UN’s cultures of assembly architectural form, which then was carried to UNESCO in plans and guidelines as the set habitus of institutional internationalism.3

The broadcast configuration of the global interior—with its stratified publics, media galleries, and global polity wired in interpretation systems inside dampened halls—opened institutional spaces to a wider public. From San Francisco to the completion of the UN Headquarters, architects imagined, designed, built, and calibrated platforms for political multilateralism. In doing so, they also shaped institutional relationships in an emergent multimodal world, while delineating the place of media and communications within it. In certain ways those global platforms reflected the political aspirations of midcentury liberalism and its core values of representational democracy, human rights, aid, security rhetoric and development politics; and in other ways, they signaled institutional shortcomings and the failure to uphold those promises. In their itinerant deployment outside the New York Headquarters, global interiors delivered platforms for diplomatic continuity among international bureaucracies (think here the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

The UNESCO House that opened its doors to the public in 1958 offered an opportunity to further finesse architectural types for global institutions. The design and construction had been undertaken by an international team of architects and engineers—Breuer, Zehrfuss, and Pier Luigi Nervi—overseen by another international team of consulting architects—Walter Gropius, Sven Markelius, Lucio Costa, Ernesto Rogers, and Le Corbusier. In addition, individual artists and designers, such as Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Eero Saarinen, and Isamu Noguchi, had contributed murals, sculptures and furniture for the interior.4 There was an evident turn toward formal and symbolic considerations, found in the team’s attention to engineered forms, conversations on the architectural expression of UNESCO’s cultural diplomacy, and discussions of how the complex would be located on its site. But regardless of this turn to architectural form and the symbols that the complex would deliver to the city, the overall plan and the interior structures deviated only slightly from the program back in New York. In other words, this concern with how built form would appear in public space was possible precisely because the UN Headquarters had already worked out the interior of the building.

If the completion of the UN Headquarters delivered a model, then the UNESCO House started turning the model into a type. For a plan to become a type that then iteratively circulates as directives for future buildings with similar functions, there needs to be a sustained demand that mobilizes (and produces) it. In fact, the United Nations Headquarters was only the first in a series of headquarters that the organization and its specialized agencies launched around the world. Following the opening of the New York Headquarters, an ambitious and expansive building program for affiliated specialized agencies and regional field offices unfolded. Plans for the design of the UNESCO Headquarters had already been underway since 1952. In 1956, the UN announced an architectural competition for the Place des Nations, eventually won by André Gutton. The International Telecommunication Union commissioned André Bordigoni to build its headquarters overlooking the yet-to-be-built Place des Nations in 1956.5 Swiss architect Jean Tschumi, who had just designed the Nestlé Headquarters, won the 1960 international competition for the World Health Organization building, a complex completed by Pierre Bonnard in Pregny in 1966.6 The International Labor Organization acquired its own monumental curved wall of offices in Geneva’s Grand Morillon in 1974.7 Many more headquarters and building complexes followed; ironically, the majority stood in the same city that the UN had rejected as its seat in 1945.8 It helped that the United Nations had repurposed the Palais des Nations for its operations in Europe, as well as its library and archive, and that an invested city administration offered incentives for more UN building projects. These buildings, often in need of conference rooms and plenary halls for international meetings, looked back to the UN Headquarters for models, gradually reifying them as architectural types for global institutions.

A growing network of consulting and chief architects transposed plans from one building to the next, and along with plans, their understanding of international bureaucracies and their needs, as well as any previous lessons they gathered. For example, Wallace K. Harrison, who had served as head of the UN Headquarters Planning Office, co-supervised the design of the International Labor Organization Headquarters with Robert H. Matthew and Carlos Raúl Villanueva. The project was commissioned to French architect Eugène Beaudouin (whose proposal for the UNESCO House had been rejected), Swiss architect Alberto Camenzind, and Nervi, UNESCO’s head engineer. Eero Saarinen, who had consulted with the UN Headquarters and whose proposal for the World Health Organization failed to win that competition, designed furniture for UNESCO. Markelius and Le Corbusier, who had worked together at the UN Board of Design, consulted for UNESCO. In this sense, architects repurposed UN Headquarters architectures, carrying plans and ideas from one institution to the next.

It is not a coincidence that those transfers mostly concerned interiors. For every new building, the UN Headquarters offered a working model that defined the spaces where international publics formed around problems. Think here of the council chamber that Jean Tschumi designed for the World Health Organization and placed in a separate marble cube outside the main building, or the UNESCO Assembly Hall. Similarly, efforts to house temporary or smaller scale UN–related operations inside preexisting buildings found in the plans that the UN Headquarters circulated a way of signifying that they partook the larger UN system of international institutions. This was especially true for field offices and regional UN branches that often took over vacant buildings or leased spaces inside larger governmental complexes. In part an economical solution, refurbishment was possible because the interiors carried more political and diplomatic value for the UN than the external form of the building infrastructure the organization was using.

The transformation of the UN’s global interior into a type that could then travel the conduits of international diplomacy helped globalize the organization’s platforms. Outside Geneva and New York, the UN regional commissions established their headquarters at times by renting out space and at other times by investing in new buildings. The headquarters for the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) that UN Secretary-General U Thant inaugurated in Santiago, Chile, in 1966 constitutes an example.9 The winning entry, which Chilean architect Emilio Duhart designed in collaboration with Christian de Groote, Roberto Goycoolea, and Oscar Santelices, detached the assembly hall (Diamante) and main conference room (Caracol) from the rest of the building, placing them inside a courtyard surrounded by a wall of office spaces (Anillo).10 Although the goal was to present architecturally regional multilateral institutions as distinct and situated, the architects again repurposed the interior spatial configurations of the UN Headquarters. The Caracol, with its cedar slats and central circular table on the floor, brought inside ECLA some of the aesthetics and cultures of assembly that the UN had launched a decade earlier in its headquarters (Plate 12). Serving as the main assembly hall after plans for a separate assembly hall were abandoned, Caracol’s principal conference hall formed a spiral that denoted a “future pattern of development” while “enfolding the round table for the delegates of the ECLA member countries.”11 Similarly, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Far East’s headquarters, located first inside Sala Santitham (1954) and later rehomed in a modernist extension for the Secretariat (1975) in Bangkok, used the types of platforms developed in New York.

Architecture schools, especially in the northeastern United States, introduced the UN Headquarters as a studio brief, asking students to imagine and design complexes for world assemblies and global governance. Others used the Headquarters as a “classroom,” particularly during its construction phase. The site quickly peaked in popularity for architectural field trips, regardless (or even because of) its incomplete state. A surge of requests for field visits reached the Secretariat: Edgar Kaufmann Jr. asked to take his NYU class to visit the site,12 as did Columbia’s art history professor George R. Collins,13 Syracuse’s architecture professor D. Kenneth “Doc” Sargent,14 and the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture professor Leon Clemmer.15 At the same time, its open guts attracted national delegations of engineers and architects, who hoped to encounter the engineering forefront of construction techniques and materials during their visits.16 There was an imagination of technique attached to the construction site that architects found intriguing and that marked the culture of an entire generation of practitioners, particularly with regard to how architectural modernism could build governance and bureaucracies.

This was not by accident. The post–World War II period brought about a deep entanglement of American corporate capitalism with international institutions. U.S. corporations were particularly interested in patronizing and milking those associations. Chase Manhattan Bank, which issued the check to fund the purchase of the Turtle Bay site, borrowed and put on display the signed and canceled check at its Museum of the Moneys of the World at the Rockefeller Center for years to come.17 IBM, as I discussed in chapter 1, equipped the headquarters with its interpretation systems. MoMA saw an opportunity to promote modernist aesthetics in this intertwining of corporate capitalism with liberal internationalism. When Mary Barnes and Toshiko Mori worked on the interiors of the new IBM Tower that would replace the old-world headquarters on Madison Avenue, the boardroom took the form of a complete round table. Arthur Drexler, the curator of the exhibition Buildings for Business and Government, which opened its doors to the public in 1957, attributed this surge of architectural production to the emergence of the United States as the new global power to reckon with. “Emboldened perhaps by its present role in world affairs,” the curator noted, “the United States no longer demands that major government commissions be executed in antique styles.” He instead proclaimed that architects have finally given the United States what it needed: “modern American buildings.”18 Most of the offices represented in the exhibition were related one way or another to the production of global spaces, either on the level of institutions or corporations. In fact, some of those offices, such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), had participated in the planning and construction of the UN Headquarters. What the exhibition diagnosed as an affinity between corporate America and governmental buildings was in reality the quite conscious and willful production of government as business and of business as government, and to that end globalized as well.

UN delegates and officials, who participated in council and committee meetings, realized very quickly that these physical interiors organized much more than just diplomatic work. They actively produced an internationalist imagination of a world society. To walk in the UN’s Babelesque corridors and sit in the conference rooms along with journalists and publics following debates unfolding around the table, transposed the visitors within the world of international relations, triggering an imagination of participation in this world community of policymakers, media, and politicians. There was no other medium as impactful as architecture itself. UN Department of Public Information officials, who comprehended well the potential value the building carried for the organization, organized tours that opened up the Headquarters to visitors as the building was nearing completion. They declared that the most effective way to illustrate the work of the UN was to visit the Headquarters and experience firsthand the collectives forming inside the three council chambers and the General Assembly. The External Relations Division even instituted scripted guided tours as part of the organization’s public relations toolkit, ensuring a uniform message about the organization.19

By the early 1950s, the UN’s distinct visual and architectural language came to define more widely institutional spaces of multilateralism. Political and diplomatic attempts at multilateralism outside the UN used those same spaces as representations of cooperation in their inaugural presentations to the world. At Expo 58 in Brussels, the first world exposition to follow World War II, the Bureau International des Expositions made space for an International Section that hosted the pavilions of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community (later to evolve into the administrative authority of the European Commission), and the Hall of World Cooperation.20 The International Section placed the political proposal for a European parliament within the context of a much bigger project of postwar multilateralism. Architects designing pavilions for the Section were promised a central place on the Expo 58 fairgrounds, with proximity to heavy human traffic and hence an expanded audience, but in the end attractions and other paths stirred the crowds away.21 Although not a novelty (both the 1937 World Fair in Paris and the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair featured international institutions), these pavilions pressed on the idea of liberal internationalism and the presence of global institutions as regulatory mechanisms in a transforming world order.22 And in this reinforcement, the United Nations Headquarters appeared again as a model. Next to Hugo Van Kuyck’s dome for the United Nations, Karl Schwanzer designed the Council of Europe Pavilion to be, as he claimed, the “protective roof of Europe.”23 Schwanzer installed at the center of his pavilion another international platform and invited Finn Juhl, the Danish designer who had arranged the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the UN Headquarters, to design it, including a fully operative council chamber—complete with simultaneous interpretation booths and semicircular tables (Plate 13).

The UN’s global interiors caught on in films and TV shows for their capacity to represent international order, but also because they spoke to aspirations and imaginaries for the constitution of a world community. The UN Headquarters represented an operative world community and system of global governance for a wider public to put confidence in. As Glenda Sluga shows, Hollywood producers formed a close partnership with the United Nations, as did national broadcasters.24 Consider for a moment Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) where the UN lobby, with its curvaceous balconies, signals a manhunt of diplomatic significance. The UN officials, particularly the Department of Public Information, initially welcomed this entanglement. These films promoted a view of the organization as aspirational global governance with the capacity to move beyond national borders to address humanity. Often these films featured the UN’s itinerant platforms, whether recreated or real, to mark the presence of an international polity in action. Appropriating the UN’s architectural language, these films delineated platforms of global politics, and at times even turned the Headquarters into the mise-en-scène of their plot. Rudolph Maté’s science fiction movie When Worlds Collide (1951) brings the viewer inside the Security Council, at times looking at it through the interpreters’ booth and at times from the floor. There an alarmed Dr. Hendron tries to convince an international body (speaking several foreign languages) to pay attention to calculations showing a planet en route to crash into Earth. The film construes the Security Council as a place of political possibility, concealing its asymmetries and the political impasse that often characterizes its operations.25 Similarly, in the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” (1962), a nine-foot-tall extraterrestrial enters the Security Council to address humanity in a ploy to gain the trust of the UN as the world’s governing body (Figure E.4).26 In Maxwell Shane’s drama The Glass Wall (1953)—an allusion to the Secretariat Tower’s curtain wall, but also a double entendre that signifies transparency and exclusion at once—a desolate Vittorio Gassman, facing deportation, pleads his case with an empty Economic and Social Council on behalf of all displaced peoples (Figure E.5). In A Global Affair (1964), a UN bureaucrat who happens upon a baby in a basket outside his office adjures the General Assembly to help him find a family for the child.27 These moments of filmic projection established UN interiors and their architectural grammar as part of the syntax of global governance, but also as sites where one could address the world even when (and despite the fact that) governance lay outside the organization’s purview and legal authority. Acting as filmic stand-ins for world governance, these physical interiors presented the promise of a democratic global society, with its own organs, platforms, and polities, regardless of its failures to include (ECOSOC is empty, the Security Council does not believe the scientist, and so on), and at times even hesitation to deliver.

But the social and political structures that architecture shaped within the United Nations also traveled outside the space itself, allowing for their use by organizations and collectivities that at times even criticized the liberal internationalism of the institution itself. At colleges, universities, and schools, Model UN taught students to be part of this new world society, celebrating the UN General Assembly as a democratic public sphere where member states bring the interests of their interiors.28 Workshops and seminars carried those structures of internationalism further inside the decolonizing world. The UN reinforced its image as an organization installing workshops around the world, with illustrations of experts and managers sitting around tables full of paperwork vis-à-vis photographs of people at work: women operating switchboards, nurses, teachers, farmers. The idea was that the UN’s reports and resolutions did not gather dust inside file cabinets, but rather translated into action on the ground—actions that, however, appeared to consistently build a differential and trap the world into two positionalities: that of a presumably aid-seeking global South and that of a global North as vector of expertise, progress, and philanthropy. Specialized agencies such as UNESCO, FAO, and WHO used those itinerant platforms for their outreach efforts, elevating them into techniques of world organization and development. They created international publics; they taught skills; and ultimately they moved the values of liberal internationalism from one institution to the next.

The UN’s physical interiors taught convening bodies how to exist and work in the space of institutional multilateralism. They even dictated what a space of multilateralism can be. In this sense, those physical interiors installed modalities of diplomacy. But, at the same time, these did not go unchallenged. The emerging Non-Aligned Movement, a critical counterpublic inside the United Nations Headquarters, appropriated those spaces and structures to lobby for an anti-colonial vision of world organization. The UN General Assembly functioned as the platform and the medium through which this coalition of member states collectively pushed the body politic to protect the interest of smaller and newer member states.29 But from Bandung (1955) to Belgrade (1961) to Lusaka (1970), this itinerant body of nonaligned member states reimagined the architectures of assembly for a more equal, anti-colonial vision for world organization, even when framed within the ideas of liberal representative democracies. Their criticisms of the UN Security Council as a limiting and excluding organ extended to the architecture. Starting with the meeting in Belgrade, the Non-Aligned Movement challenged and enlarged the structure of the round table to bring on equal footing not only a limited number of national governments, as was the case at the Security Council, but all member states joining in (Figure E.6).30 In more than one way those physical interiors materialized another imagination of world order and revealed the power politics in effect (especially in the case of the Security Council), hence challenging them and inviting their critique.

At the end of the day, the UN offered its itinerant platforms as instruments of representational democracy and ways to bring the world community inside the spaces of international relations and diplomacy. These global interiors, the public front of the diplomatic habitat, worked as stages and platforms for a world elite, a means to produce internationalism on the level of government rather than people, built on a liberal investment in political representation. Inside the United Nations, this imagination produced international bureaucracies as communications and translation machines that extended far beyond their physical limits, often organizing themselves in networks, while holding onto a coherent image of institutional internationalism and world governance at the core. And while seemingly redundant, this image marked the United Nations as an ever-expanding, open-ended infrastructure of communication, rather than a resolute and absolute enforcer of policy.

There are, of course, all the ways that these itinerant interiors also failed. As stages they have often encouraged performative politics and diplomacy for domestic audiences. The transparency these global interiors promise tends to be more representational than literal, with backstage diplomacy in lobbies and lounges many a time determining negotiations and results. Peoples, the vast world community—the majority that the organization enjoys evoking in its published matter and public announcements—exist only as audiences for its circulation of expertise, technique, and know-how. The global interior is designed to speak, but has very limited capacity to listen, and even less so to act. And, of course, the very organizational structure of the United Nations limits the kind of democratic procedures that the global interior enables, with the unwieldy power of the permanent members of the Security Council actively undermining any attempts at a global democracy in the General Assembly. History tells us so. It may be time for a new architecture, one that allows for a democratic organization of society to center on the majority. And to realize this political horizontality on the scale of the world, as something that acts not just on our immediate surroundings but on a planetary level, we need to keep thinking, building, and expanding how we come together, how we assemble. Perhaps we can learn from this twentieth-century experiment in creating a global interior for international organization, reconsider the structural limits of a world ordered by nations tenuously united, and move together toward more just and open structures of assembly.