Cultures of Assembly

The World’s Navel

In the years leading up to the first UN General Assembly at Church House and Central Hall in London, national delegates and their advisers occasionally touched on the topic of the headquarters, considering probable locations and spatial arrangements. Mentions of possible sites offered glimpses into the latent cosmopolitan and colonial desires driving the engines of international organization. For example, there was a persistent belief that leisurely landscapes often eased diplomatic negotiations, a belief that concealed the classed realities of the world of diplomacy. But at other times, those same conversations shed light onto new modes of diplomatic being and world organization that aligned the new institution with corporate America and its bureaucracies.

These first conversations entangled the structure of the new institution with geopolitical concerns. Since the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his team had intertwined the question of location with different models of world order. His initial proposal for a federalist approach divided the world into zones of regional control with four designated “policemen” states heading them: the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom. Apart from maintaining an overview of regions, the federalist model’s decentralized bureaucracy required multiple regional capitols with equivalent administrative and executive power to install its network of world governance.

When Roosevelt purged the “four policemen” plan in favor of a globalist model centered on one international institution managing all political and territorial conflict, the project of institutional quadrupling started making less sense.2 But Roosevelt insisted on avoiding a fixed center, proposing a peripatetic assembly and the dispatch of less critical components of the organization to regional centers to counteract the centralization of power.3 During the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, he repeated his proposition for a dispersed institution with a permanent Secretariat, a traveling assembly, and a council of the major powers alternating among two or three sites. Roosevelt also assigned locations, putting the Secretariat somewhere in the United States and the Council on an island, with a roaming General Assembly moving from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. He pointed to the Empire State Building or the Pentagon as possibilities for the Secretariat, indicating his desire for a powerful bureaucracy, and proposed the Azores or Hawai‘i for the new Council.4

Roosevelt’s plan resonated with the utopian aspirations of proposals arriving at the Preparatory Commission’s office. Some of them even suggested, in truly peripatetic fashion, that the new headquarters should take the form of a ship traversing the oceans.5 However, unlike the utopian drive behind the many proposals that U.S. citizens put forward at the time, Roosevelt’s project constituted a calculated political step toward American imperialism, with the administration anchored in the United States (the new aspirational center of the world); an isolated central council protecting the postwar world order away from press and public, yet close enough to the U.S.; and a detached open and international assembly in the role of the public front.

The UN Preparatory Commission, which was to translate charter principles into an operative organizational structure, arranged the first sessions of the UN organs and organized the Secretariat administrative structures. The commission had launched its operations in London, taking over Church House, Westminster, originally designed for the Church of England and its headquarters. Used occasionally by the House of Lords, Church House had already hosted the War Crimes Commission and part of the drafting of the UN Charter. There, the Preparatory Commission planned the new organization and held the first meeting of the Security Council. The commission populated a global diplomatic elite of statespersons, including eminent figures such as Peace Conference participant Wellington Koo (China), League of Nations veteran Nasrollah Entezam (Iran), and disarmament advocate Philip John Noel-Baker (United Kingdom). All committees were international in their composition; they received their charge from previous committees; and they produced reports, which they submitted for approval to the General Assembly. The location as well as the requirements for the UN Headquarters fell under the purview of Committee 8, the Preparatory Commission’s technical committee for general questions, and later Committee 10, a subdivision within Committee 8 dedicated to the question of the headquarters.

The Preparatory Commission transfigured the debate between the regionalist/federalist and globalist model for world organization into a debate between centralized and decentralized institutional structures, where centralization stood for efficiency and decentralization for democracy.6 Delegates inside the Preparatory Commission judged both models on their capacity to carry out a purported democratic and open world organization with an operational center capable of addressing the entire world as its public, a seemingly impossible task. While considering the “principle of centralization,” they recognized the consolidation of political power this model would require.7 They also quickly realized that the choice of location was both a political and a geographical matter. In choosing the location, delegates would ultimately determine a new political and diplomatic center, as the location would undeniably affect configurations of power networks within the new world order. These conversations shaped priorities not only on the level of legislation and organization, but also on the level of planning and design.

The problems that accompanied centralized institutions were clear to international policy think tanks, which had been trying to imagine ways of maintaining configurations of political power already determined before World War II. Among the handful of institutions to prepare guidelines for the new organization was the Royal Institute of International Affairs—later known as Chatham House, an institution that continuously inserted itself in the design of institutional policies and strategies for international organization. The Royal Institute, where historian Arnold Toynbee was serving as director of studies, produced and circulated several reports building on the experience of the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization. In its pamphlets, the Institute advocated for a globalist approach to foreign policy with a world state in mind.8 Partly to establish continuities with the old colonial order, and partly due to the infrastructure already in place, the Institute championed the choice of Geneva, the location of the headquarters of the League of Nations.9 Legal scholars and policy experts knew that centralized institutions necessitated expansive and effective communications systems for their global reach. Apart from infrastructural support (transmission centers, broadcast stations, switchboard centers, press accommodations), this meant in addition a need for the right legal and cultural conditions, “diplomatic immunity,” and a robust Information Section akin to the United Nations Information Organization (UNIO).10

C. Wilfred Jenks’s proposals piqued the interest of the Preparatory Commission delegates, who were curious to see how the Royal Institute translated the League’s institutional structure into a new organization.11 In The Headquarters of International Institutions Jenks, former legal adviser to the International Labor Organization, construed the new headquarters to be the center of a large communications network, and in doing so, he also demonstrated how vested the new organization needed to be in communications.12 He condemned earlier proposals for decentralized and peripatetic institutions as wasteful, favoring the centralization of all resources and services instead. His proposal advanced an imagination of the new headquarters as a global communications hub, with a “world parliament,” “libraries and records,” “exceptional printing, telecommunication, coding and decoding, and other material facilities.”13 Jenks repurposed in his rhetoric ideas of world cities put forward by Andersen, Otlet, and others in the beginning of the twentieth century, emphasizing the communicative role that the seat of the new organization would play in the new world order.

Jenks’s treatise steered the Preparatory Commission conversation toward communications infrastructure. The young international lawyer warned against all forms of isolation: “small island communities,” “academic seclusion,” and locations of racial or religious hostility. The new headquarters should be open and in touch with the global polity the organization hoped to address.

It is these factors, and particularly the facilities for maintaining contact with the work of international institutions available to the press, the radio, the newsreels, publicists, educators, students, and representatives of organized opinion groups . . . which will determine the extent to which future international action will receive a solid backing from public opinion.14

Jenks even proposed the installation of television facilities to disseminate the message of the new organization.15 His essay established communications as the problem and the answer for any attempt to launch a globalist world order. He did not prescribe form but left the planning for the physical headquarters to the “experts,” without, however, avoiding speculative projections that oscillated between a robust headquarters complex and a fully developed “international city.”

In the place of physical decentralization, the new global institution would rely on the circulation of information. The delegates of the Preparatory Commission discussed this new role of communication technologies and infrastructures early on in their meetings. Terms such as “diffusion” and “communications” appeared frequently in the verbatim reports. British diplomat Philip Noel-Baker noted that “international life in a material world must diffuse itself from an international centre where, without disturbance from national elements, it is permitted to breathe the international atmosphere.”16 He reasoned that centralized institutions managed resources more efficiently and that communications, both in terms of technical infrastructure and outreach programming, could weave a global community around the UN as well as—if not better than—a diffused constellation of regional institutions. Building on Noel-Baker’s convictions, the commission approved the plan for a common and shared headquarters, believing that communications systems would sufficiently substitute for earlier regional plans and decentralized models.17

The conversation on communications infrastructure brought forward the operative tensions between the ideal of global connectivity and its local implementation, particularly concerning institutional independence and sovereignty. Communications infrastructures were complicated legal and political systems whose operation depended on multilateral agreements and negotiations among private and state actors. Even when institutions acquired their own radio stations, as was the case with the League of Nations, they depended on the local infrastructure to transmit their broadcasts and press releases, or even to make an international phone call. Delegates who placed the United Nations Headquarters within larger circulation systems realized that tapping into national communications systems would potentially compromise the institutional autonomy of the UN. Contemplating the question of sovereignty, members of Committee 10 pointed to Washington, D.C., and Vatican City as models for legal extraterritoriality and administrative independence from local legislation.18 Extraterritoriality served autonomy, an autonomy that tapered the organization’s infrastructural needs, since the headquarters would still have to establish a relationship with national communications infrastructures and energy grids, to mention only some of the technical landscapes involved.19 Especially for communications, UN bureaucrats would have to create alliances and support fragile dependencies on national and private media conglomerates. Commission delegates maintained that proximity to established metropolitan centers that offered robust transportation and telecommunications infrastructures would address some of these needs.

The Preparatory Commission also understood the geopolitical significance of a centralized institution for international relations. An initial recommendation in favor of the United States stirred debate: European representatives, who perceived the proposal to be threatening to the relevancy of the old colonial order, used regionalist arguments to affirm Europe’s continued centrality to the new world order. “It would not be desirable to centralise all international life in one country,” noted Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian statesman who campaigned for the European Union and later served as Secretary-General of NATO. European representatives went as far as to cartographically misconstrue Europe as the “natural and inevitable communications centre of the world”20 or to present it as “the cradle of modern civilization,” building on colonial takes on history.21 Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American representatives, who saw in the new headquarters the opportunity to shift the center of administrative and executive power,22 persistently dismantled “European arguments” that sought to reinforce old hierarchies rooted at the League and to stratify certain state members as “second class” citizens.23 Luis Padilla Nervo, the Mexican ambassador, acutely voiced his frustration:

Let us not talk the language of 1920 or 1938. Let us not talk about the ‘Mother of Civilisation’ in relation with the issue before us, or we will have to engage in a historical debate about the ‘Grandmother’ and the ‘Great Grandmother’ of it. . . . Let us not talk of Europe as the centre of the world from which everything radiates and to which everything converges. The world to-day, Gentlemen, has not one centre any more, except that moral centre to be built up by the common purpose and combined efforts of the United Nations.24

By the end of the discussions one thing was clear: the fight over institutional centralization constituted, in reality, a fight over European hegemony and its contestation.25

The site of the headquarters mattered for its semiotic capacity to denote the gravitational center of the new world order and the geopolitical affinities that order created. Driven by an anti-colonial sentiment to shift that center away from the European continent, the final vote affirmed a new world order on the rise with the United States at its center.26 The old colonial order, initially supported through proposals for regional control, gave way to a new approach, both more expansive and more centralized. The promise that communications channels would hold the new institution accountable to its wider public resolved what started as a diplomatic and political debate by means of engineering and infrastructure.

The Preparatory Commission reframed the headquarters in terms of a brain managing and controlling the operations of this larger communications organism. Communications and transportation systems entangled the institution with the global polity it hoped to order and govern by proxy. A Technical Advisory Committee on Information proposed the establishment of a Department of Public Information to handle UN policy on news circulation.27 At the same time, communications emerged as a central concept for organizing the building itself. The report asked for “corridors” as a spatial means of connecting departments with administrative infrastructure; for “service arrangements concerning messengers, and attendants”; “writing room”; and space to help with the “distribution of documents and notices.” It also requested room for “radio, cable, telegraph and telephone facilities” and technical support in the form of “certain devices for speech transmission and recordings, and for simultaneous translations of speeches into the five official languages,” listing all the ways in which communication would be instituted within the body of the UN. The headquarters would not only be the center of a larger communications system, but be itself a communications organism.

Starting with the Preparatory Commission, a battalion of committees and subcommittees took over the planning of the headquarters, turning its design into a bureaucratic process. Committee 10 put together a first set of guidelines for requirements; Committee 8 recommended specific site locations and refined the program; the Interim Committee and its Inspection Group further narrowed down the potential sites from six to two, and arranged for the temporary headquarters; the Headquarters Commission located particular plots of land within the two recommended areas; the Planning Commission outlined the project and coordinated the construction from the drawing board to the opening of the headquarters to the public; and the Board of Design developed the plans, sections, and elevations of the project. Drawings made the proposal a concrete possibility, but in that initial stage, text allowed UN diplomats to have a say in the organization’s architecture, even if in terms of metaphors and requirements, feeding the emerging bureaucratic superstructure with their ideas. Within this context, the introduction of communication as a principle and requirement for world order constituted a recalibration strategy that allowed the centralization of international institutions to prevail in a postwar world critical of overgrown centers.

World Capital or Headquarters?

News of UN committees discussing the Headquarters location triggered a torrent of proposals. Perceiving the creation of the UN to be a U.S. affair, U.S. citizens flooded the office of Edward Stettinius—the Secretary of State turned U.S. ambassador to the UN—with suggestions. Architects, lawyers, contractors, and members of the public asked U.S. officials and UN committees to make space for them within the new headquarters. Charlene Mires discusses at length how private citizens, public administrators, communities, and city officials campaigned for their own cities.28 She shows how local actors employed world-capital plans to convince the different UN committees of the viability of their sites, often building on earlier versions of world cities. Some communities, emboldened by the charter, used the opportunity to campaign for their rights. Ben P. Choate, a Choctaw Nation lawyer, offered the Choctaw Capitol plot in Tuskahoma in southeastern Oklahoma, a nomination that would be “no finer or nobler tribute” to “minority groups” in the area.29 Proposals earlier dismissed resurfaced as possible solutions, as was the case with Paul Otlet’s international city for scientists, artists, and scholars.30 These projects ranged in scale and detail from vague suggestions to worked-out plans.31 Petitioners often provided drawings and maps illustrating the fitness of the proposed sites, as was the case with the borough president of the Bronx, who put forward Riverdale, New York, an “isolated” yet “accessible to the heart of the City” site (Figure 2.1)32 or another letter writer who appended a variation on the theme of the World Centre of Communication for the “United Nations Center,” complete with plan and tower of progress in the middle (Figure 2.2).33 The letter writers felt themselves part of the UN’s public that they aspired to shape, willing the organization to enlarge its scope into world governance.

U.S. professional organizations and journals sparked a field-wide conversation not only on the location of the UN, but also on the possible role that architecture could play within international institutions. The UN appointed Howard K. Menhinick of the Tennessee Valley Authority to direct the Headquarters Planning Committee. U.S.-based architects and planners approached the Planning Committee with theories and suggestions. Professional societies such as the American Institute of Architects, the American Institute of Planners, the American Society of Landscape Architecture, and the American Society of Civil Engineers all lobbied for their representation in the process of the site selection.34 Representatives of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) also hoped for an active role within the design process. Speculative articles appeared in all the major architectural publications at the time: Progressive Architecture, Architectural Forum, and Domus, to name a few.35

Regardless of references to “headquarters,” the conceptual stupefaction over the scale and character of the building infrastructure persisted. UN diplomats inside the Preparatory Commission indulged visions of world capitals and international cities in an effort to speak to and formalize a global polity. UN press releases muddled state capitols and capital cities with the UN headquarters, confusing buildings for legislative organs and cities with sites of organizational management. The evocation of a “world capital” spoke to the diplomatic imaginary at work. A world capital created the illusion of world governance without necessarily legitimizing it. Like capital cities, a world capital offered to its citizens an open and living symbol of governance and sovereignty to visit and project themselves onto its built environment. Different delegations inside the Preparatory Commission were also sympathetic to the idea of a “world capital,” believing that a city, rather than a headquarters, would better denote the gravitational power that the seat of the new global organization would carry. In memoranda, national representatives drew comparisons with Geneva and entertained the idea of suburban locations.36 The UN Interim Committee on Headquarters and the Permanent Headquarters Committee both anticipated a city forming around the seat of the new organization.37 A world capital, unlike a headquarters, allowed fictions of a global federation of states to linger a bit longer, as well as offered national representatives to the UN an opportunity to reimagine their habitus and diplomatic work as tools of governance. An international polity could roam the streets of a world capital, feeding visions of a space that included rather than excluded publics. Contemplating urban forms and questions of an international city, a polis, meant examining also future forms of world citizenship, since, at least in the mind of the delegates, cities ordered societies and publics.

No project articulated this vision of a “world capitol” more forcefully than the proposal that Mayor O’Dwyer and Robert Moses put together for the nomination of the former grounds of the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows (Figure 2.3). Gilmore D. Clarke, in collaboration with Aymar Embury II, Wallace K. Harrison, and Louis Skidmore, enveloped the General Assembly with an enormous cupola at the end of a monumental entryway and the rest of the capitol bowing in an otherwise classical arrangement of colonnades and art deco sentimentality. Hugh Ferriss’s dramatic renderings illustrated the domineering cupola, marking in space the presence of the UN General Assembly, as both global and central to the new world order, denoting the intention to include the world by using the dome as an architectural symbol of universality. Within the General Assembly Hall, clearly marked with the laureled map of the world beaming light, the ocean of people gleaming under the dome left no doubt that the intention was to host the entire world (Figure 2.4).38

But how was a capital city to be global legally, functionally, and symbolically? Lewis Mumford, who had been thinking and writing about cities, had some suggestions. In his memorandum to the Inspection Group of the Interim Committee that was assessing sites, he talked about the “interior reconstruction” that a new world city would induce.39 He believed that the mere existence of an internationalist space could instill humanist values in its surroundings, further pushing out the corporate and managerial drives behind urban development projects. The new city, “for it will be a city,” he noted, “must be a City of Man; not a City of Western Man, not a City of North American Man, best of all, not an American City. It will be in America, but not of America, except in the sense that it is also of Asia, of Africa, of Europe.”40

Mumford also gave voice to concerns and solutions aired within the architectural community, mapping out—and later rejecting—three major approaches. He opposed Philip Johnson’s and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s strand of modernism as the sole appropriate expression of internationalism on the grounds of its reduction to a style with fixed elements. He sympathized with Andersen’s idea for a World Centre of Communication, but regretted its purported “aesthetic expression of unity” for subordinating all parts to a “centralized authority.” Capital cities such as Washington, St. Petersburg, and even the palatial complex in Versailles epitomized this kind of fictitious aesthetic unity to be avoided, as did Vatican City, a popular legal example of extraterritoriality. At the same time, he vehemently disapproved of the eclecticism of World Expositions and International Fairs, explicitly attacking the Rue des Nations planning feature for celebrating nationalism and reducing internationalism to a serial display of “variety” and “national idiosyncrasy.”

For Mumford internationalism was a process and an organizational principle, not a form. Unity, he noted, could only emerge from a collective process, where “strife and turmoil and discussion” would eventually lead to a “new center of a world organization” that synthesized the many historical, regional, or cultural references into one coherent physical arrangement for all.41

For the unity to be sought is not an arbitrary, abstract, paper unity, to be imposed at the beginning and never departed from, but an organic unity, imperfect as all living things are imperfect, but serving as a principle of order, to be struggled toward, to be worked out, but never to be stultified by a surface perfection that allows no place for the further workings of time and mind.42

Mumford invited the Inspection Group and the Preparatory Commission to engage with “the collective mind,” rather than assign the task to specialists. He advised against architectural competitions, a solution championed by MoMA dignitaries and CIAM representatives. He proposed instead a planning process that involved the publics the UN wished to form, turning the temporary locations into the testing ground of spatial configurations for the different organs. And although in practice this process was never formalized to the extent that Mumford wished, parts of the proposal were. The various committees—including the architects participating later on—surveyed civil servants with experience in international administration and examined the temporary placement of furniture and bodies in London, as well as Hunter College and Lake Success, New York. “World co-operation,” Mumford wrote, should infiltrate the processes and drive the final result, from the conception of the headquarters to the final built form.43 The organization filed away most of the externally produced reports that arrived from outside the UN’s official channels, turning them into the archive of the institution’s inability to address its publics outside their national containers. Mumford’s proposal was no exception to that rule, being largely ignored despite assurances of its wide circulation, possibly fueling his later critical takedown of the Headquarters in his “Skyline” column.44

But committees, although often presenting otherwise, are not uniform. Not all delegates planning the UN envisioned world capitals with global polities roaming their streets. Inside the Headquarters Commission, members voiced concerns about this approach. The discord kindled Le Corbusier, the architect who had joined the commission as the French representative, and who hoped to create receptive conditions for his work and to forge a place for CIAM. Le Corbusier had inserted himself at an early stage, before any structures and design committees were set in place; he also understood that efforts to include the world, even as a representation, led to palaces and world capitals, programs antithetical to the architectural modernism he hoped to champion for the UN.

The machine metaphor was prevalent in descriptions of the UN organization and its seat. Official documents, minutes, and decrees had referred to the site as “headquarters” at least since the San Francisco Conference on International Organization—if not earlier, during the Dumbarton Oaks negotiations. Politicians and high-ranking officials often described the new organization as “an instrument” and not an “enchanted palace”; an “effective machine” second to none;45 and later, on the eve of the Cold War, a “delicate machine.”46 Abe H. Feller, who was the legal adviser to the UN and participated in the planning of the headquarters, proclaimed the UN organs the “machinery of the Organization,” with their “cogs and gears” waiting to be polished.47 Building on the machine metaphors that UN diplomats and delegates put forward, modernist architects advocated for a functionalist approach to the headquarters design.

The term “headquarters” used in official documents and press releases spoke to the desire for a centralized control center to manage the passage from the old colonial to the new world order. The term “headquarters,” reminiscent of military operations, suggests that the seat was also seen as the command post of a considerably larger unfolding enterprise. During the nineteenth century, inside “headquarters” commanders managed war theaters, missionaries organized expeditions, and colonial administrations planned strategies to further embed themselves within local social fabrics and markets while extracting resources and labor. By the end of World War II, the term came to signify corporate capitalism and the centralization of its expanding operations to global markets.48 Corporate headquarters worked as the center that held together and commanded the company’s dispersed body. Architects found in corporate America a welcoming ground for modernist experimentation with the physiognomy of office buildings.49 But headquarters also denoted a relationship structured along the lines of a communications apparatus that further removed publics and placed them outside in abstracted zones of operations—the field. The existence of a headquarters suggested, not only a managerial approach to administration, but also an institution that organized its expansion and growth through communications centers.50

The term sat well with UN aspirations to install a worldwide system of management. Le Corbusier, who had joined the Headquarters Commission inspecting sites, affirmed that the UN assignment was for a “headquarters,” establishing the design problem as univocally modern. In his personal report to the sixteenth meeting of the Headquarters Commission, proclaimed as the official opinion of France, he issued an ultimatum to Secretary-General Trygve Lie: “World Capital or Headquarters?” (Plate 5).51

Words are bearers of their own destiny. The assignment is given to establish the Headquarters of the United Nations in the United States. Headquarters means an assemblage of persons and instruments at a given spot connected with the zone of operation by the most efficacious means of communication. The zone of operation is, in this case, the entire world, all points of which are known and accessible today.52

Le Corbusier proposed that the design of the headquarters, conceived as an instrument in the service of the UN, should “draw upon the prodigious resources of technics” and engage with the “mechanizing world.”53

In advocating for “headquarters,” Le Corbusier confirmed the latent presence of an almost military understanding of operations in the design of those spaces, especially evident in the temporary headquarters that the U.S. Signal Corps had been building for the organization in the Sperry Gyroscope Plant, Flushing Meadows, and Hunter College. He subsequently equated the UN’s expansion with deployment strategies, and he theorized this new global space in terms of an “assemblage,” a system of “persons and instruments” very similar to the systems that tied ships, aircrafts, and combat vehicles in communication loops with command centers. Architects were not to design palaces, but rather infrastructures for a new communications organism built to grow and manage theaters of operations globally. “One manages well only what one controls,” affirmed Le Corbusier, anticipating that the organization would expand and install similar “control points” in geopolitically cardinal locations.54 This theorization of the UN headquarters pointed to the emergent comprehension of the organization’s seat as the brain of a communications organism that construed the world community, the publics the UN wished to address, as a “zone of operation.”

Le Corbusier gave architectural form to his infrastructural vision. The drawing to illustrate his proposal for the General Assembly, the Council Chambers, and the Commission Halls brought together under one roof all the spaces for communal deliberations, hanging from a block of trusses in the ceiling (Figure 2.5).

First you see a group of bridge girders, destined to control the character of all possible ceilings and more precisely those of the halls, assembly, councils and commissions: Henceforth each ceiling is independent of the ground, suspended; the halls can therefore obtain any desirable size being neither bound down nor disturbed by the cumbersome presence of the supports. ‘Façades’ and ‘silhouettes’ need no longer be our concern. This important building, housing the Assembly, Councils and Commissions, will be a vast and regular quadrilateral mass.55

In reducing the outside to a box, Le Corbusier reframed architecture as systems management and articulated an entirely new—and unlike him—infrastructural approach to design. He drew attention to the spaces of assembly and collaborative work, the social spaces of the new global institution that the rest of the building would support with communications and technical systems. He also proclaimed those spaces the subject matter of technical knowledge (acoustics, lighting design, and air conditioning), positing that the headquarters would emerge in the conjunction of support systems with public forums. He continued advocating for a unified infrastructural block, or the “Forum” as he called it, all the way until April 1947, when the design of the UN Headquarters had moved to the hands of the Board of Design.

The chair of the Headquarters Commission, Sir Angus Fletcher, endorsed parts of Le Corbusier’s report, agreeing with the criticism of the term “world capital,” as did a confidential “critique” that circulated within the commission.56 Additionally, the report received some unlikely supporters in Washington: congressmen, who, concerned with relinquishing U.S. territory to the UN, warned against “world capital” initiatives and the extensive internationalization of land they required. Instead, they lobbied for a limited “Headquarters District” that accommodated only the main organs and functions of the UN, with a more flexible—in terms of sovereignty—“zone” surrounding the international ground.57 Within a matter of six months, the imagination around the UN Headquarters had moved away from palatial aspirations to infrastructural realities, placing communications and technological systems at the heart of the literal and metaphorical architecture of the UN.

A Workshop for Architecture

In January 1947, Wallace K. Harrison was given the most coveted job in the world—or the “world’s number one job” as the United Nations World described it: to be the Director of Planning leading a team of designers, engineers, and contractors to design and build the United Nations Headquarters. The UN needed a manager-architect with experience coordinating large construction projects, and Harrison fit the bill. As a member of the New York Commission for the United Nations and the American Institute of Architects, Harrison had been entrenching himself deeply in the networks of real estate, diplomacy, and governmental bureaucracies growing around the UN. He had received his initial education at the Boston Architectural Club (one of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects ateliers maintained in collaboration with the Worcester Polytechnic), and he had apprenticed in the ateliers of such prominent American architects as McKim, Mead & White and Harvey Wiley Corbett.58 Having worked for some of the largest architectural offices at the time, Harrison recognized the managerial aspects of architectural work. His quick ascendance up the ladder of New York architectural offices brought more projects and new partnerships with Raymond Hood and later J. André Fouilhoux; a widening of his social circles; and a lucrative lifelong friendship with Nelson Rockefeller after Harrison’s marriage to Ellen Milton, Abigail Rockefeller’s sister-in-law. By the early 1940s, his designs for Rockefeller Center and the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, as well as his projects for real estate tycoons William Zeckendorf and the Rockefellers, had put him at the center of architectural production in New York.59

But what truly brought his candidacy to the table was the deal he helped secure between Nelson Rockefeller and William Zeckendorf for the UN Headquarters amidst a complicated and contested field of site nominations. By late 1946, just before his appointment, state and municipality representatives had offered plots of land from New Jersey to South Dakota, and from New Orleans to Hyde Park.60 Reports on zoning, boundaries, transportation infrastructure, facilities, and topography deluged a group of delegates, who, surrounded by maps and drawings, found it exponentially harder to decide (Figure 2.6). If, in the Nuremberg Trials, graphic representation and visualization techniques helped prosecutors make the case (chapter 1), at the Headquarters Commission, they aggravated confusion, demonstrating that visual representation can only be effective when configured to present an argument. “Facts” rarely speak for themselves, and a productive comparison became increasingly impossible as technical descriptions and maps flattened all sites to equally problematic solutions.61 Locations were vetoed on the grounds of racial discrimination (California nominations suffered due to the only recently repealed Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as did any area south of the Mason-Dixon line) or religious prejudice (a public speech against atheism and the USSR jeopardized Boston’s case), with signs of local protest against the headquarters disqualifying nominations.62

The story of the final site selection is well known and has been widely documented. When the Headquarters Commission resolved to propose a site in Westchester, New York in early December 1946, delegates, who had been growing enamored with New York urban life and frustrated with their commute, frowned upon the idea of a suburban location.63 But officials felt that the lack of a permanent home put at risk the organization and its stability. Mayor O’Dwyer, wanting to keep the headquarters closer to Manhattan, put together the United Nations Committee of the City of New York for his campaign. Faced with the possibility of losing the commission to another municipality, members of the committee, who coveted the investment and real estate opportunities that the UN Headquarters would bring to New York, rallied to keep it within the five boroughs.64 On December 15, 1946, the UN General Assembly accepted Nelson Rockefeller’s offer to buy the Turtle Bay plot from William Zeckendorf and donate it for the establishment of the headquarters. Secretary-General Trygve Lie praised Harrison for his “forthrightness, common-sense approach, and diplomacy” during negotiations.65

Meanwhile, after considering a number of venues from the Country Center in Westchester to Atlantic City’s Convention Center or Boston’s Symphony Hall (all of them dismissed for either involving long commutes, or lacking housing vacancies and office space),66 the UN Inspection Group wound up recommending the Sperry Gyroscope Plant at Lake Success for temporarily hosting the Secretariat,67 expecting alternative accommodations for the General Assembly closer to the city.68 The directive motivated Mayor O’Dwyer to expedite negotiations and secure locations for the temporary headquarters in and around the five boroughs, first at the Bronx branch of Hunter College (present-day Lehman College) and later, when Hunter asked for the return of its campus facilities,69 the Building of the City of New York at Flushing Meadows. These were the sites where the UN General Assembly, the Secretariat, and the three councils would test and configure their habitus, organize their public spheres, and define their relationships with the general public and the press.

By the time that Harrison took over the lead for the Headquarters design in early January 1947, the idea for an architectural competition had been aired and tabled for countering ideals of collaboration and unity. The truth of the matter was that UN high-ranking officials were trying to avoid the possible—and in their minds almost unavoidable—backlash from an international competition going awry, let alone the delay in construction that said competition would result in. And although UN bureaucrats at the Secretary-General’s office kept their distance from the troubling (and misconstrued) legacy of the Palais des Nations competition, they did not hesitate to adopt the collaborative model used there to synthesize the finalists’ entries, with Lewis Mumford’s blessings.70

Harrison supported the idea of an international team of architects working together, especially since such collaborative efforts replicated the structure of commissions and specialized committees before them. The design of the headquarters was no different a problem than the planning for the organization of the Security Council or the General Assembly. National representatives, nominated by their governments and selected by the new Director of Planning, would present and debate their projects in front of the group, echoing the review and jury culture in architectural schools, but with the ultimate goal of synthesizing all solutions into the final project.

The UN could project the Board of Design as an open, democratic, and international structure precisely because the selection process had already either excluded or marginalized contingent voices that might have contested the process. Harrison immediately surrounded himself with confidants. He appointed Max Abramovitz as Deputy Director; George Dudley as liaison with Executive Secretary Glenn Bennett; Oscar Nitzchke as chief designer; and Hugh Ferriss, the illustrator responsible for the Rockefeller Center and X-City renderings, as the head of the drafting team to support the Board of Design with renderings. Invitations went out to all member states, requesting the nomination of architects for the board. Harrison launched a Research Section within the Headquarters Planning Office, headed by writer and dancer Faith Reyher Cook, who compiled meticulous candidate profiles, accompanied with biographies and portfolios.71 In addition Cook solicited articles, books, and photographs of projects, helping Harrison to select the architects of the board based on their formal language and architectural approach.

This celebration of communication and inclusion was only to designate procedures rather than results. Although delegates welcomed the idea of promoting a collaborative ethos, dialogic procedures, and international participation, the board was marked by certain absences and Harrison’s invisible work backstage. Not all member states were in a position to send a representative; El Salvador, India, Siam, and Syria all refrained from nominating due to lack of resources. Chile, Czechoslovakia, the Union of South Africa, Ecuador, Iraq, Mexico, and Panama, to name a few, sent nominations that did not move forward or were replaced by a candidate favored by Harrison (and Le Corbusier).72 The final composition of the board and the technical advisers tilted considerably toward the European and North American world, with the exception of Oscar Niemeyer from Brazil, Julio Vilamajó Echaniz from Uruguay, and Liang Sicheng from China.73 Additionally, in requesting blueprints and photographs, Harrison ensured that the participating architects shared some foundational modernist language, eliminating candidacies with historicist and academic tendencies in their architecture. His process did away with the problem of judgment, since he had made sure that board members shared to a certain extent a modernist aesthetics and agenda. Finally, the discursive process of collective assessment he proposed complicated authorship claims and buttressed the authority of the Director of Planning over any one architect in the group.

The Board of Design, along with its entire infrastructure of draftspersons and model makers, took possession of the twenty-seventh floor of the Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) building.74 Harrison and Abramovitz cleared one side for mounting and debating working drawings, while moving the drafting room and office space on the other side, setting design production and critique in a continuous feedback loop (Figure 2.7). The two architects understood very well that, although the debate theatrics implied otherwise, power lay in the drafting room backstage, where conversations and abstract ideas were translated into architectural form. To manage the operation, Harrison and Abramovitz placed their offices next to the drafting room, overlooking the developing projects on the ground, yet removed from the conversation. “If you dropped into the Conference Room, any lunch-hour, you would see plans, sections, elevations being brought in from the drafting room,” Ferriss remembered.75

Harrison spent most of February confirming the rest of the board members. In the absence of a quorum—the last architect to arrive showed up in early April—the Director of Planning prioritized the translation of requirements to spatial relations. Harrison’s decision to limit conversations on the headquarters plan and to postpone decisions on architectural form constituted a strategic move that allowed him to suspend individual board members’ ambitions to determine the external form of the building—often the site of contestation—and in doing so, to also manage conflict and debate. Buildings, the form they deliver, mattered. Elevations and facades fossilized the architectural gesture, inscribing metonymically the presence of the architect within the space of the city. Interiors, perceived as malleable and transient, did not carry the same weight for Harrison’s board architects. George Dudley, who left the most complete record of those meetings, was surprised with the leniency architects demonstrated in discussing and revising their plans on the Headquarters interiors.76 A couple of months later the external orientation and form of the Headquarters would spark debates over monumentality and authorship, but for the time being, it would be designed from the inside out.

In the beginning, the board spent most of its time shifting around model rooms for the councils and the meeting agencies, even debating at times the importance that certain UN organs might take and their impact on form. The preliminary outline that Harrison shared with the Board of Design was surprisingly architectural in form, mainly reflecting the diplomats’ eagerness to see the organization acquiring a body. The report on “basic requirements” detailed the number of floors, terraces and loading platforms, courtyards, and ponds, calculations for a General Assembly with “continental” type seating, and ample lobbies. The preparers had translated quantitative needs into buildings, giving the Secretariat the form of a slab and the UN council chambers a “Forum” bloc shape determined down to its conferencing tables (Figure 2.8).77 The Committee on Requirements admitted their plan was too “specific,” but reassured the architects of its “imaginary” nature.78

In contrast to the detailed plans for individual chamber and meeting room types, the report that the Headquarters Commission had submitted to the UN General Assembly in 1946 did not delineate how different parts of the administration related to one another, or how to organize them in space. Diplomats and UN bureaucrats had ideas about operational affinities and structural connections among organs and divisions, but not a plan for them. Council chambers, meeting halls, conference rooms, plenary halls, office space, and the Secretariat appeared as floating elements in search of an expressive unity. The organization itself, the UN, would be as much a matter of design as it would be a matter of executive planning. Ralph Walker, one of the consulting architects, noted that in the process of resolving the plan, corridors and lounges started gaining an out-of-place prominence, probably the outcome of the board’s divided attention between interior arrangements and external form, but also of the stated need for spaces for backstage informal diplomacy.79 Walker’s remark also revealed the growing attention on the physical connections that would allow certain communications while limiting others.

During the four months that the Board of Design convened, its architects debated the placement of principal UN organs.80 No drawing or proposal survived in its entirety the deliberations of the group; the final project was to be a mash-up of architectural solutions for the international organization. The architects, however, did not think and design in the absence of models. Following the San Francisco Conference, the nascent UN organization, with the help of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Works, had found a first configuration inside the refurbished Central Hall and Church House in London, where it held the first UN General Assembly and Security Council meetings. A semester later local contractors, carpenters, and builders, based on the experience in London, transformed the gymnasium, cafeteria, and Davis Hall at the Bronx branch of Hunter College under the guidance of Ralph Walker.81 By the time Board of Design members arrived in New York, that UN setup was long gone, but its lessons lived in the paired temporary headquarters at Flushing Meadows and Lake Success, both sites that the architects of the board visited and studied.

The temporary headquarters offered the board architects valuable insights into the new organization and its emerging cultures of assembly and work. Harrison actively sought out the input of UN officials and diplomats, inviting them inside the board’s meetings along with consultant engineers and associate architects, setting in dialogue form and social structure. Principal Director for Conference and General Service David B. Vaughan, who had overseen arrangements for the temporary headquarters in NYC, often attended those meetings, describing the delegates’ experiences on the ground and possible problems arising from those spaces. Delegates approved the seating arrangement at Flushing Meadows, but recommended that press, radio, and simultaneous interpretation booths be encased within walls rather than hanging over the audience.82 After the dissolution of the Board of Design, the Headquarters Planning Office conducted an investigation at Lake Success and Flushing Meadows and found that tables constituted a crucial piece of equipment and instrument of the liberal internationalism at work.83 The Interim Site Committee’s specified requirements for the temporary headquarters had designated a hall for the General Assembly, two council chambers (of which one would be dedicated to the Security Council), four committee rooms with tables arranged in a U-shape large enough for fifty-five delegates and a table with verbatim reporters at the center, as well as four to five smaller rooms for committees of fifty people total. For the General Assembly, the same memorandum had asked for accommodation for a “working group” of approximately seven hundred persons, including delegates, alternate delegates, advisers, and UN Secretariat personnel, to be arranged in rows of seating, with space in the back for the public and the press, as well as abundant space for a lobby, check rooms, restrooms, and lounges.84 The close examination of those temporary headquarters taught the Planning Office that the media infrastructure of booths, broadcast studios, and interpreter stations should be organized along the side walls (neither in the back, as at Lake Success, nor in the corners, as at Hunter College) to optimize filming angles for camerapersons and interpreters.

In a shortwave broadcast, Australian architect and board member G. A. Soilleux, who had worked extensively on theater architecture, recalled the process as “a melting pot” where “ideas, suggestions, schemes . . . are exhaustively culled over, discussed, praised, jeared [sic] at and finally boiled down in a series of joint discussions conducted in a mixture of English, French and the universal language of the pencil.”85 Canadian architect Ernest Cormier similarly noted that the meetings resembled the Tower of Babel. “Every man spoke a different tongue, and with three official languages, French, English and Russian, they had a time pooling ideas.”86 In a press release, the board declared:

To those outside who question us we can reply: we are united, we are a team; the World Team of the United Nations laying down the plans of a world architecture, world and not international, for therein we shall respect the human, natural and cosmic laws. . . . We are a homogeneous block. There are no names attached to this work. As in any human enterprise, there is simply discipline, which alone is capable of bringing order. Each of us can be legitimately proud at having been called upon to work in this team, and that should be sufficient for us.87

Symbolism and Its Discontents

Public and press expected the Board of Design to deliver a symbol of world peace, an architectural signifier of internationalism and global unity. Yet Harrison, who had opened the meetings asking for a “real monument . . . with a feeling that it opens out,” systematically steered the board away from conversations on architectural form.88 In reality, the focus on functions and requirements created the right conditions for a functionalist determination of the headquarters. Soon the Secretariat tower, a variation on the corporate skyscraper, emerged as the most well-defined and monumental in scale component of the UN Headquarters, sparking debates over its orientation, form, and relationship to the rest of the complex. The emphasis on administrative rather than public-facing diplomatic work that the Secretariat building brought about troubled even the most convinced modernists among the board architects. At the same time, the functionalism that had produced a distinctive slab for the organization’s bureaucracies was threatening to compromise the General Assembly without delivering the symbol the general public had been asking for. Jonkheer Jan de Ranitz, the Dutch architect who had joined the requirements committee earlier on, had tried to establish a building code that would have solidified the prominence of the General Assembly, prohibiting skyscraper modernism, but Le Corbusier had vehemently and successfully opposed the suggestions out of fear of historicist monumentality gaining a foothold yet again.89 Every so often, the board architects wondered what would be the appropriate General Assembly form against the towering Secretariat.90 Some proposals subsumed the General Assembly within larger blocks along with the council chambers, completely disregarding any need to render it legible on the outside. Other proposals obsessively investigated possible architectural symbols capable of rivaling the emerging corporate tower, but those proposals rarely caught on during the meetings.

The intention was for the architectural form to signify the new organization, but opinions varied on what and how to signify. The functionalists among the group resisted conversations on symbols and their value, worrying about opening the door to architectural expressions that had served older institutions such as palaces and churches. But the group also included voices that were critical of de facto architectural modernism, advocating for the new headquarters to deliver a powerful symbol for the world. Ralph Walker, the most vocal among them, had been equating functionalism with the rise of a “mechanistic evangelism” in architectural culture, which he found antithetical to the humanist values that should, according to him, inform any new building following World War II.91 He had accused the “impersonal, the abstract, the international” of being synonymous with a mass mentality, regretting the celebration of mechanized culture and what he saw as the loss of human values.92

The presence of the press during a 1947 mid-April meeting of the board forced architects to revisit the conversation on the value of architectural symbols. This time Harrison, who had been using functionalism as a tactic to avoid debates on form (misleadingly implying that the translation of function to form is causal and direct, leaving no room for interpretation), asked the board to consider the dome as a possible solution for the General Assembly. The opportunity arose with Sven Markelius’s proposal and quickly made apparent the ideological nature of disagreements on forms and symbols (Figure 2.9). For the board, architectural forms were not empty of representational value. They carried political weight that communicated priorities and alliances. Nikolai Bassov, representing the USSR, vehemently criticized domes as symbols of Christianity and religion, a criticism that found the Yugoslav Ernest Weissmann in agreement. It was not that the architects on the board rejected all attempts at visual representation, but rather that they wanted control over it. Symbols opened the door for historical forms to enter the architectural body, a threat that the architects pushed against, proclaiming to the press that symbolism was unnecessary, tradition was dead, and symbols “old.”93 The question at stake was which architectural language the UN Headquarters would make monumental, as the Chinese representative Liang Sicheng noted. Le Corbusier, Maciej Nowicki, and Sven Markelius univocally dismissed the question of monumentality, proclaiming it the end result of “good design.” “Radiance,” remarked Markelius, would come “from inside,” confirming the functionalist imperative at play in designing the Headquarters from the inside out.94

After the board settled for scheme 42G—derivative of Oscar Niemeyer’s proposal—later in May, Harrison took over, asking the drafting architects to develop a full set of plans and sections to illustrate the proposal for the General Assembly. On September 26, 1947, he presented plans for approval to the Ad Hoc Committee on Headquarters, a committee charged with outlining next steps for the establishment of the headquarters.95 Contemplating the process, Harrison proclaimed the end result a departure from both the aesthetic monumentality of capitols in Washington and Paris and the “structural monumentality” of modernism where “man is a little dot lost in the great theory.” Instead, he argued, the Headquarters that the Board of Design produced was antimonumental in that it centered on the UN delegates and the various publics formed in the council chambers, the assembly, and the lounges. In retrospect, Cormier noted, “We weren’t trying to produce an architectural masterpiece, but a tool to do a job.”96 Comparing the design of the Headquarters with railway construction, Harrison proclaimed the process a piecemeal operation from inside out, “one foot at a time.”97

The UN Headquarters that Harrison presented to the Ad Hoc Committee extended from 42^nd to 48^th street between 1^st Avenue and the East River, without delineating exactly where U.S. territory ended and where UN territory started (Figure 2.10). The shiny slab of the Secretariat skyscraper with its glass curtain wall—a tower that would later accent the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive views with its white marble cornice—loomed over the curved low silhouette of the General Assembly. Behind the two buildings, the Conference Block that hosted council chambers, conference rooms, and the main lounge would open to the diplomats an expansive view of the East River and Queens but would remain hidden from the general public.

The plans of the future UN Headquarters featured ample low-definition space of lounge areas, exhibition walls, sculptural ramps, and staircases anchored on very well-defined and closed-off spaces—conference rooms and council chambers—additionally buttressed with walls of broadcast and filming studios (Figure 2.11). Two lower levels covered parking needs, while making space as well for the United Nations’ printing services, library, and archives. A monumental lobby with curvaceous balconies gave way to wide low-ceiling passages that led into the upper galleries reserved for the general public in the council chambers and the General Assembly Hall, thence opening up again into the hollowed-out spaces for the convening delegates. But behind this seeming celebration of openness and flexibility lay a rigid understanding of access and diplomatic labor.

Early on, UN representatives had asked the Board of Design architects to separate the publics occupying the Headquarters into four groups with different levels of access and visibility: the general public, Secretariat, delegates, and press. G. A. Soilleux, the board’s Australian architect and theater design expert, noted how ordering the social life within the organization and planning for the circulation patterns of four publics had complicated the design process.98 The architects afforded the four publics distinct experiences of the same building and organization: the general public would enter Headquarters from the foyer behind the auditorium of the General Assembly; the delegates from behind the president’s podium; and the press representatives and Secretariat employees from the side of the Secretariat.

The building itself organized how these publics accessed the complex, as well as how they moved inside it, emulating how OSS’s Dan Kiley had separated the publics of the Nuremberg Trials earlier in 1945 (chapter 1). By placing the public’s entrance on the northern part of the General Assembly building, the board architects limited the general public’s access to the open space surrounding the General Assembly Hall and its upper galleries, keeping the public away from the Secretariat building to its south, the delegates’ lounges and cafeterias, as well as service areas and office space. A separate entrance on the side guided delegations directly onto the floor of the General Assembly Hall and its seating area, while press representatives entered through the Secretariat, accessing studios, switchboards, messenger services, and telegraphs available to them. Inside the UN, the general public and the press took a seat in the global theater as audience, with the press seating area acting as a buffer zone between the floor and the upper part of the auditorium, a design decision that illustrated programmatic priorities. Meanwhile the Secretariat’s international civil servants roamed the entirety of the headquarters but remained invisible to everyone except the delegates.99 In this sense the architects designed the UN’s public sphere as separate from the rest of its publics, although they at times wondered if such a separation was desirable or not. Even the general public, which architects and designers often recalled in their deliberations, and which UN bureaucrats aspired to include within the headquarters, in reality consisted primarily of delegates’ personal guests (Figure 2.12).100

The preliminary report submitted later that fall to the General Assembly quoted Harrison concluding the Board of Design meetings with a declaration: “The world hopes for a symbol of peace, we gave them a workshop for peace.”101 The report proclaimed that the Headquarters tied together the various UN organs as “functioning parts of a single coherent organism.”102 The idea of an ever-expanding communications network was still central to the UN’s imagination. To that end the Board of Design had visited the Bell Telephone Laboratories, examining the challenges and opportunities telecommunications offered for the headquarters and its design.103 Communications technologies would provide the “nerves” that tied “together thousands of working units, individuals and groups of individuals within the headquarters and throughout the world,” and ultimately, “with the larger world complex of communications between men and nations.”104 But communications, either in the form of telephonic networks or organized movement, structured distinct publics and delivered a tiered system of access, although the planning office wanted the press to believe differently. Within this context, architecture’s job was to manage this infrastructure and deliver public spaces that subordinated the technological to the human element, while disguising hierarchies of access and power that the communications systems installed.

Tables of Diplomacy

Behind this shift toward a more infrastructural approach to the design of the UN Headquarters lay the political imperative to replace bilateral diplomatic relationships with a system of multilateralism. The UN had reestablished diplomacy as a bureaucratic enterprise, a shift planned at least since the time of the League of Nations Secretariat and its management of colonial interests. Yet the end of World War II placed an impossible task in the hands of diplomats and architects: to produce a space celebrating a liberal understanding of humanity, while architecturally articulating an even bigger bureaucratic organization that would bring order and peace out of the chaos, fear, and paranoia that the war had generated.

Tables emerged as the quintessential objects of liberal internationalism. Most UN committees convened around tables, almost always in rented rooms within office buildings such as the Rockefeller Center or conference venues such as the Church House, in London. Diplomats understood the politics of seating and how tables silently installed hierarchies, entangling their shape and form with discussions on emerging cultures of assembly and the organization of the UN public spheres. Who gets a seat at the table; does the table have a head; how close or far away should the delegates sit; who sits next to whom? These were all questions running through the delegates’ minds each time a new committee deployed itself within a room.

This conversation became more apparent with the design of the council chambers, since these were the spaces where UN organs presented themselves to the public as operative institutional structures. Inside the plenary hall of the General Assembly tables demarcated the distinct positions of audience and speaker, but council chamber conversations, where delegates faced and spoke to one another, required that tables created, at least perceptually, a common shared space. Indeed, tables inside meeting halls and council chambers determined the form that the international public sphere would present, and by extension the conversational cultures the organization bestowed on its publics.105 Diplomats insisted that the new tables should bring all delegates together on equal footing, even if this appearance of equality did not reflect the fiscal realities and political asymmetries among the invited member states.

During the time of the temporary headquarters, table configurations inside meeting halls betrayed lines of institutional continuity that high-ranking officials publicly disavowed. For the Preparatory Commission, for example, the architects borrowed furniture from the London office of the League of Nations, bringing inside the UN the convening structures of the League and ILO (Figure 2.13).106 In workshops and meetings, national representatives and their advisers sat at oblong tables set against walls, with verbatim reporters and typists often placed in an island at the center—a round-table structure that had been almost religiously observed for meetings of international organizations. For the council chambers administrators even adopted the open round table of the League of Nations Council at the Palais des Nations, a shape that was also used at the temporary headquarters, first at Church House and later at Hunter College and Lake Success, illuminating conspicuously the ties between the two institutions (Figure 2.14). Any future configurations for negotiating colonial and national interests would build on these initial structures.

During the meetings in San Francisco and London, there was a growing impetus to foreground collaborative work and center the new organization on some idealized form of international “cooperation” (Figure 2.15). The mobilizing desire was to install “humans” at the core of a growing anonymous and impersonal technocracy, against the bureaucracies that were taking hold of diplomacy and structures of multilateralism. Those politicians saw in tables the symbolic potential to represent democratic processes centered on conversations, rather than deliberations. Conversations entailed the existence of a central topic or question that brought together different positionalities, hence grounding processes of multilateralism on publics forming around issues of global concern, rather than on singular perspectives and their rhetorical projection toward an audience. These exchanges highlighted the UN bureaucrats’ articulation of institutional stewardship as care for the world. In addition, diplomats believed misguidedly that the “right” material conditions could elevate international relations into democratic processes around “worldly things” beyond the usual bilateral and multilateral negotiations.107 World War II and the masses-as-publics of the Third Reich pushed thinkers, politicians, and sociologists at the time to reckon with the dismantling of public life. How publics form and transform became the concern that marked much of the postwar period, along with debates on modes of governance. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt argued that the public realm constituted a space of appearance where citizens deemed equal and free present themselves to one another while coming together to act and speak in concert for a shared political goal. She suggested that the table was a homology of the world we share: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.”108

Arendt was hardly alone. If the League of Nations put forward a global bureaucracy as the response to World War I, then World War II challenged the very idea that reason or technique alone could guarantee individual freedom, let alone the democratic function of a society. In the aftermath of World War II, a group of researchers who had operationalized psychology and the social sciences for military purposes sought to use their wartime work for the cultivation of peacetime democratic reflexes. Social scientists and psychologists did not constrain these efforts to the scale of the state. In fact, the entire world could be addressed as a complex social mechanism that sociologists and psychiatrists could help manage.109 From Max Horkheimer to Hadley Cantril and Otto Klineberg, researchers proposed that new media frameworks reorganize interpersonal encounters. International organizations were also interested. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) enlisted a wide roster of anthropologists and sociologists for conflict resolution in international relations.110 The goal was to develop the tools, media, and methods that would shape the future citizens of the world.111

Thinking along similar lines in 1945, George de Huszar, a progressivist at the Faculty of European and Asiatic Area Study at the University of Chicago, tied these new frameworks for democratic processes to social and spatial structures. His Practical Applications of Democracy, although published while still a graduate student, attracted wide-ranging interest in the fields of political science, international relations, and education. For de Huszar “democratic conduct” took on specific spatial configurations. “Democracy is something you do; not something you talk about. It is more than a form of government, or an attitude, or an opinion. It is participation,” he declared. He classified democratic conduct into three different categories: the “talk-democracy” that encouraged dialogue in the form of correspondence; the “consent-democracy” centered on elections; and the “do-democracy” of self-organized publics that mobilize around social or political problems. De Huszar criticized talk-democracy for allowing totalitarian regimes to flourish, and he denounced consent-democracy for infantilizing its citizens. Only do-democracy, according to him, engaged citizens in action, cultivating the democratic reflexes of publics. These small groups (understood as “workshops”) set up for questions and issues consisted of no more than twelve people; they shared a “problem” in the center; and they met at a round table. De Huszar believed round tables to be markers of do-democracy collaboration, promoting equal access and participation in problem-solving (Figure 2.17).112 The method for cultivating democracy deep inside governmental structures and their bureaucracies was to install cooperation as a method to organize work around workshops and roundtables. De Huszar’s treatise circulated widely within the UN, convincing delegates and the architects in the Secretariat Division of Public Information who were to advise on settings for UN events that round tables constituted icons of democratic processes, and thus a fitting representation of the institution to the world.

The UN had inaugurated its existence at a round table, reenacting Arthurian mythologies. At the conferences predating the signing of the charter, the State Department and Executive Offices of the President set up circular tables inside the convening venues at Moscow and Yalta, with cameras and film crews tucked away to cover the events.113 At the San Francisco Conference on International Organization, the OSS staged the signing of the UN Charter at a perfectly round table, symbolic of the equality that the UN purported to install centrally at the new world order. “The delegates insisted that each man must have an equally important seat around a common table. We have not been able to find any other scheme of keeping equality amongst the delegates,” Harrison confessed in a talk before the American Society of Landscape Architects. “I hate to admit it, but we have tried court and auditorium types and this is the only one the various responsible people can agree upon,” he noted.114

Once the UN moved from the idealized space of the San Francisco Conference to the drawing board, architects and Secretariat diplomats placed round tables firmly inside the council chambers, where cameras and journalists would most likely attend the meetings, and to a lesser degree inside meeting halls and conference rooms. The more removed from the public eye the function of the organ, the less architects adhered to the round form. Ralph Walker, along with Robert Glenn, had prepared the temporary Security Council, placing a semicircular table across the auditorium containing press and public, with yards of pink drapery on the walls dampening reverberation. The Security Council Chamber at Lake Success, most probably modeled on the League of Nations Council, also featured booths for simultaneous interpreters at the very back of the auditorium, and filming and broadcasting booths on the sides.115

The Board of Design architects had also spent a good amount of time thinking about those tables and the relationships they installed while convening in 1947. Round and oval tables required different footage, but also inducted different hierarchies among the delegates, with circular surfaces requiring more space around them and elliptical tabletops unavoidably creating heads among the conveners.116 Making the symbolic nature of the table clear, Andrew W. Cordier insisted that “the complete circle is best.”117 Tables were to be staged as the symbolic and representational anchors organizing the new public spheres emerging within the council chambers. At the UN temporary headquarters at Hunter College and elsewhere, the presence of mass media had complicated the direct translation of the round table into built form, illuminating the role of camera angles in the design of council chambers. UN official David Vaughn, the Director of Conference and General Services, joined by Cordier, insisted that the press should see the entire floor.118 The board architects kept wondering if council chambers were rooms or “theaters,” a commentary that many architectural publications reiterated after the opening of the headquarters (Figure 2.17).119 Sicheng noticed that closed-circle round tables did not stage well for television or film; UN representatives reminded the board architects that interpreters would also require eye contact with all delegates speaking, complicating the design. A round table would need broadcasters to televise delegates’ backs and would obstruct the view of interpreters in the galleries. Architects also carefully considered how their presence inside council chambers affected the representational value of their form. Experimenting with the layout, they argued that placing public and press on opposite sides of round tables transformed meeting halls and council chambers into gladiatorial spectacles, effectively undoing any of the collaborative spirit the round table was meant to install (Figure 2.18). Nikolai Bassov regretted the affiliations that the plan created with a “circus” or a “ring,” and recommended elliptical shapes instead.120

The circular form, however, was not adopted universally within the headquarters. Inside the three council chambers, the Board of Design architects adjusted the circular table to accommodate for variable council mandates. The UN Charter bestowed on the Security Council—probably the most asymmetrical UN organ given the veto politics and its two-tier membership system—the authority to manage geopolitical conflict, including taking military action. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) instigated and coordinated research on social and economic issues that at the time ranged from reconstruction to the administration of technical assistance, human rights, economic development, and gender equality. ECOSOC aimed at preparing policies, reaching agreements with specialized agencies, and issuing recommendations for the General Assembly, while taking into consideration the reports of a growing number of regional commissions, internal committees, and conferences. Finally, the Trusteeship Council, consisting of the administering authorities (often former colonial powers) and an equal number of non-administering members, oversaw decolonization processes in trust territories and managed colonial interests.

These tables inside the council chambers would have to accommodate administrative support, advisers, typists, and verbatim reporters, impelling the board architects to hollow out the circular table. As a closed form, the circular table implied an organizational finitude that restricted growth and expansion, complicating the institution’s aspirations to fold in the entire world. To suggest the openness of those councils while incorporating within their very structure the presence of the press, the architects proposed that the tables remain open toward the audience. Ironically, but maybe precisely because it was the only organ to administer war, and to that end the most exclusive one, the Security Council was given an almost perfectly circular finite table with one side open for its televising. For the Economic and Social Council, the board proposed a horseshoe configuration, and for the Trusteeship Council an open parabolic form, alluding to the evolving work of institutional decolonization in response to anti-colonial movements forcing the hand of the organization. Inside the latter, what was presented to press and public was not delegates convening, but rather decolonizing nations presenting their case to the council, placed along the table (Figure 2.19a). Apart from working on that foundational assumption of national representation that peoples and their governments are one and the same, interchangeable, these tables endowed the organization with institutional platforms that also ordered and formed its public spheres.

This culture of assembling around tables permeated other parts of the organization as well, particularly conference rooms (Figure 2.19b). Inside the Secretariat, meeting rooms with considerably larger and less flexible working tables ended up determining the overall plan. “Everything else serves them,” Max Abramovitz declared.121 To design those rooms, the board consulted with Eero Saarinen, the architect who, during World War II, designed military presentation rooms for the U.S. War Department and the Navy.122 Julio Vilamajó Echaniz, the Uruguayan architect who had joined the group in late March 1947, had argued for the adoption of the round form inside the General Assembly to signify “working together,” a suggestion that did not move forward, but revealed how architects endowed form with representational value. Behind their formal choices there was a surprisingly stagnant understanding of political form. The General Assembly constituted fundamentally an auditorium, a performative space dedicated to public speaking, and council chambers were spaces for debate (chapter 3). A round table seemed more appropriate for council chambers than for plenary halls. Building on the auditorium type, Harrison and team proposed a parabolic plan for the staging of speeches inside the General Assembly, implying an exponential growth representative of the institution’s desire for expansion.123

Regardless of institutional efforts to present them as such, the three councils were not made equal. UN diplomats and high-ranking officials, along with national representatives from member states, understood well that the Security Council, the only organ approving military sanctions in the name of “peace and security,” was to be the heart—and often the biggest obstacle to the democratic processes—of the new organization.124 Zuleta Ángel, a career diplomat and first president of the United Nations General Assembly, admitted to the board the structural prominence of the Security Council, contradicting the official directives.125 Le Corbusier seemed to think that this hierarchy should also be articulated architecturally, proposing a more conspicuous form for the Security Council, but other members of the board, who questioned whether the General Assembly or the Security Council held a more decisive role within the organization, criticized such formal prominence for fixing in space institutional hierarchies.126 Architects were to build into the headquarters the parity that the institution lacked. Although the Security Council operationally ratified the power asymmetries that created it—with five permanent members holding veto power and treating as “guests” the ten nonpermanent members, as Isobel Roele notes—in public its architecture needed to hide them.127 In this sense the table in the middle of the room installed an illustrative (rather than operative) equality among members.

When, in 1948, Secretary-General Trygve Lie assigned the interior design of the Security Council to his compatriot Arnstein Arneberg, the one element of the room exempted from the design was the table (Figure 2.20).128 The Headquarters Planning Office had claimed design purview on the tables, as well as the chairs in the auditorium and, of course, the physical arrangement in space of media, interpreters, secretarial support, and delegates. Abel Sorensen, the Danish architect who had been working for the Headquarters Planning Office overseeing the dressing of the interior, would design and supervise the selection and construction of chairs for press and public, and most importantly the delegates’ tables for all council chambers. In the end, all Arneberg had to design was the framing and environment around that table within predetermined plans: walls, ceiling, carpets, curtains, upholstery and delegates’ chairs.

Similar directives went out to other Scandinavian architects two years later, when the UN—activating a gift economy to dress its headquarters within budget—invited member states to take over the design of the other two council chambers.129 The Academy Council of the Royal Danish Academy nominated Finn Juhl to design the Trusteeship Council Chamber,130 and the Swedish government nominated Sven Markelius for the ECOSOC Council Chamber. The choice of the three designers cemented the position of mid-century Dutch and Scandinavian design as the quintessential expression of modern internationalism. It also helped that Abel Sorensen, under the direction and advice of national export councils and commerce chambers representatives, traveled to Europe in the early summer of 1950 to consult with the three architects and collect information on furniture makers, sampling various national productions for the UN interiors.131 In short thank-you notes, Sorensen affirmed his loyalties to Scandinavian and Dutch designs, often reassuring officials of their country’s representation within the UN.132

But the Headquarters Planning Office did not relinquish design control. When Arneberg, working from Oslo, presented Harrison with his proposal for a ceiling fresco and a wall-to-wall mural, the Headquarters Planning Office responded with the creation of yet another committee to set guidelines for the character and placement of art within the Headquarters at large (Plate 6). The architects in the Planning Office found the mural and ceiling fresco disorienting, distracting attention from what they perceived to be the central feature of the room: the round table. Although Harrison managed to talk Arneberg out of the ceiling fresco, he did not prevent the mural, which Arneberg defended not only as part of his own vision, but also as part of the Norwegian gift, effectively turning a debate about aesthetics into a debate about funding. “The Norwegian Government will most likely not be interested in letting the granted amount be used in just any lounge or somewhere,” Arneberg remarked.133

Withholding funds to push a certain aesthetic language was in perfect alignment with the motives behind the UN’s outsourcing of interior design, decoration, and furnishings. The invitation to external architects was part and parcel of a plan to solicit additional financial support for the completion of the UN Headquarters in the name of cultural internationalism.134 To maintain control over the present and future of the Headquarters, the Planning Office established a Board of Art Advisers consisting mainly of architects: Howard Robertson, the British architect at the Board of Design; Jacques Carlu, the French architect of the Palais de Chaillot who refurbished the building for the UN General Assembly in 1951 and later designed the NATO Headquarters; and Miguel Covarrubias, the Mexican muralist and art historian.135 Harrison recruited Irwin Edman, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, to consult the Board of Art Advisers and help them formulate guidelines. In a long white paper, Edman advised the substitution of narrative symbolism with abstraction and the signification of materiality.136 The Board of Art Advisers joined Harrison in a second UN Scandinavian trip to discuss the plans for the three council chambers in late August 1950 (Figure 2.21).137 The goal was to implement this call for modernist abstraction, controlling and directing the design of the council chambers’ interiors, so that the focus remained on the tables and the workshop cultures the UN wished to propagate.138

Inside the three chambers, Arneberg, Markelius, and Juhl researched ways to embed (and present) collaborative work and its tables within the organization and its media infrastructure. And although Arneberg marched to the beat of his own drum, deploying murals, tapestries, and marble to deliver a room with “character” that was maybe a bit “too conservative” (his words), the other two architects decided to explore what a modern “workshop” would look like.139 Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, with its wooden battens, set an example for both Juhl and Markelius, where the materiality of the room became the ornament.

For the ECOSOC and the Trusteeship Council, Markelius and Juhl respectively exposed mechanical and electrical systems, placing those chambers and their tables in dialogue with the rest of the organization in terms of infrastructure. During the design of the Economic and Social Council Chamber, Markelius negotiated the position of ducts and coils, adding a headache to the engineers’ already complicated task of maneuvering the different systems. Along with Bengt Lindroos, he uncovered the air ducts and fans over the auditorium, creating a contrast between the finished delegates’ area and the “more or less dissolved volume” of the rest of the chamber (Figure 2.22).140 In exposing the ducts Markelius obstructed form from emerging, presenting ECOSOC as a work-in-progress and the UN as a networking infrastructure centered on its formed publics (Figure 2.23 and Plate 7).

Juhl, who had been assigned the Trusteeship Council, also engaged in a formal experiment with ventilation ducts and lighting (Plate 8). In his letter to the Planning Office he described the chamber as more of “a ‘work-shop’ than a formal reception room.”141 Juhl, who had worked on the designs for Vilhelm Lauritzen’s Copenhagen Radio House, understood quite well the complexities of broadcast studios, especially in regard to the theatrics involved. Edgar Kaufmann Jr. noted that Juhl’s Council Chamber’s “clear organization . . . subordinated the spectators to the participants.”142 In a complete reversal of the dynamic that Markelius set up inside ECOSOC, Juhl’s coils, ducts, and lighting were organized in trusses and mounted on the ceiling above the delegates’ area, while excluding the public from the infrastructure that would regulate the decolonization of Trusteeship territories, which at the time represented a very limited part of the decolonizing world (Plate 9 and Figure 2.24). In doing so, Juhl produced the world public in terms of an audience watching global technocracies at work. In her review of the three council chambers for Interiors, Olga Gueft found them “unquestionably modern,” but did not fail to notice the “meeting-hall-theatre” architecture of the room that rendered public and press an audience to the drama on stage, employing theater as a metaphor to describe the three rooms.143 In doing so, she also revealed the theatrical nature of the round table that the UN architects had effectively turned into an instrument of diplomacy and an apparatus for multilateralism.

This culture of “workshops” that set out to form publics around issues of global concern in actuality transformed global bureaucracies and defined the work of international institutions in the postwar period. Not everybody was invited to the table—in fact tables, particularly the UN tables, were designed as finite objects. Yet the existence of those tables also made their contestation possible, opening them up to the continuous liberal democratic process of expanding and broadening the publics that get a seat at the table, ultimately transforming the issues that arrive to said table to become matters of concern.

Despite the architects’ persistent call to install the Design Board as a permanent feature of the UN, Harrison dismissed all participating architects after four months of convening and asserted control over the rest of the process. In doing so, Harrison decidedly ended architecture’s purview in the production of diagrams. Built form would be an entirely different subject matter. But most importantly, he suggestively divorced the architect-as-designer from the construction process—more efficiently carried out, in his opinion, by contractors and architects-as-managers.

The reception of the UN Headquarters among architectural circles was lukewarm. Harrison, who had avoided discussions on symbolism during the board meetings, had caved in, dressing the General Assembly with a sliced dome on the top of its curved ceiling in hopes of securing the loan from the U.S. Congress that would finance the construction of the Headquarters.144 A sense of deflated monumentality and less than awe-inspiring spaces left both diplomats and designers at a loss for words to describe what it was that the UN architects had delivered. Even as Harrison presented the plans for the new Headquarters to the press, the confusion over the exact nature of the new urban complex persisted, with the popular news magazine Parade declaring the UN’s new complex simultaneously a “city-within-a-city,” a “headquarters,” and a “world’s capitol.”145

The anticipation of an architectural symbol for the UN had followed the Headquarters every step of the way, from conversations on the location to debates over the shape of the tables around which national representatives would congregate. Architects blamed the collaborative framework that the architect-in-chief Wallace K. Harrison had adopted for the unresolved monumentality of the United Nations Headquarters. Monuments, or at least the monumentality they were after, could only be the result of a strong individual voice, and not of a collaborative effort and the compromises it entailed. However, UN officials had little interest in monumental scale and more desire for stripped-down technical environments that worked for the new world order and its procedures. By the time the United Nations Headquarters opened its doors to the public, the organization had adopted the term “workshops” to describe its specialized agencies in UN publications, pronouncing FAO and UNESCO “workshops for the world.” These “workshops” would be the monuments of UN’s liberal and multilateral internationalism, transforming conferences and committees from tools to symbols of the new world order.146