The Global Interior

The United Nations in the History of Architecture

The UN Headquarters is a building that we think we know intimately, although we do not. Looking over the East River, the UN Headquarters spans from Forty-Second to Forty-Eighth Streets in eastern Manhattan, right on Turtle Bay—a site that used to house slaughterhouses, cattle pens, and coal yards. It was a “dead end in the traffic sense, and a dead end to life itself,” as a journalist described the area in 1947.9 Organized along the north-south axis, the complex presents Manhattan with the Secretariat glass slab towering over the General Assembly that bends under the weight of its own dome, an image highly circulated via postcards, stamps, films, and other UN paraphernalia (Figure I.1). Inside, council chambers, meeting halls, and lobbies anchor the ever-busy floors of the Headquarters and center the institution’s multilateralism on round tables and podiums in front of UN emblems, modernist design, and the abstract materiality of wood, marble, and glass. Every fall we get glimpses of the General Assembly when footage of speakers or delegates in the auditorium circulates on broadcast news. At times, heated debates garner the Assembly more airtime, or a particularly contested Security Council meeting might give us a bird’s-eye view of the room, but this is where our imagination ends (Figure I.2). We never get to see the full room, with its architecture of subject positioning, or the connections the design forges among its constituents in its off-camera sites of active diplomatic work. Our view of the Headquarters, although seemingly intimate, is decidedly fragmented and partial.

There are reasons for this misconception of the building as a familiar object. A series of well-illustrated publications during its fiftieth anniversary celebrated the UN Headquarters as an iconic example of modern architecture produced in the intersection of a real estate transaction between William Zeckendorf and Nelson Rockefeller, and Le Corbusier’s architectural rivalry with Oscar Niemeyer.10 Around the same time, Wallace K. Harrison’s right hand, George A. Dudley, published his own detailed record of the architectural conversations, accompanied by drawings, minutes, and other print matter—a historical record that nonetheless puts the weight of the discussion on the four months of architectural debate that took place in 1947.11 In monographs, architectural historians have carefully articulated the individual contributions of member architects, focusing on the role that the UN Headquarters played in the development of architectural modernism.12 Still, those accounts hesitate to contextualize the building within a social and political framework that critically encounters the institution vis-à-vis the era of decolonization and multilateralism.

Architectural historians, initially in response to feminist critiques, have been moving beyond a focus on professionalized actors, widening the scope of who counts as architect.13 Building on these criticisms, Assembly by Design examines the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, thus challenging the artificial construction of the UN Headquarters’ history around a handful of architect-protagonists. I approach architecture as a discursively formed field and the territory of political contestation. Apart from designers, the architects of the UN include engineers, diplomats, midlevel bureaucrats, administrative assistants, librarians, and manufacturers. I understand those professionals as constituting interacting ecologies of expertise, architects in their own right who determined the cultures of assembly, the place of media, and the overall material culture of international relations.

The UN Headquarters has often been incorporated in theories of modernist evolution articulated in exhibitions and books. In the 1952 edition of Built in USA, for instance, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock added the UN Secretariat to their list of prime examples of American corporate architecture.14 In 1968, Reyner Banham used the UN Headquarters to theorize architecture as systems of environmental control, a conversation that Alexandra Quantrill and Joseph Siry have critically revisited since.15 And again in 1978, Rem Koolhaas called for us to think of the complex as a “utopian fragment” that concludes what, he argued, was an era of urban development and experiment unique to Manhattan.16 An exception here is Ada Louise Huxtable, who treated the Headquarters as an imperfect variant of modern architecture, declaring it a work-in-progress with its unfinished ceilings and colliding aesthetics of infrastructures, sculptural balconies, and dramatic staircases.17 But what happens when we situate and examine the UN Headquarters from the perspective of the network of global institutions and the fields of power that produced it, as well as the aspirations and resistances that shaped the project of liberal internationalism? How does this shift in perspective change the stories we tell about the building and the lineages of architectures of internationalism?

Architectural history survey books place the UN Headquarters firmly within a canon of modern architecture in North America and Western Europe, but not without criticism.18 Either to illustrate corporate architecture in the United States or to exemplify the failures of architectural modernism in the post-1945 period, these accounts reiterate two major critiques issued against the building at the time of its completion: the first, by Lewis Mumford, declared the complex a “disoriented symbol” of “corporate America,”19 and the second, by Sigfried Giedion, dismissed the complex as altogether unoriginal.20 It is true that the United Nations was conceived as a bureaucracy on a global scale, and the diplomats and functionaries involved in its making rarely shied away from this managerial reality. Along the same lines, originality was never part of the vocabulary essential to the building and the organization. In fact, skepticism toward avant-gardism and its associations with political radicalism drove many of the decisions that handed Wallace K. Harrison supervisory control of the project. Building on those criticisms, architectural discourse has systematically interrogated the Secretariat Tower, at times conflating it with the entirety of the UN Headquarters. Here I am attempting a revision of the disciplinary framework, contextualizing those criticisms rather than building on them, and recovering the rest of the built reality of the UN Headquarters and its significance for the liberal order it came to serve.

Urban historians have interrogated the impact that the United Nations Headquarters had on New York City, displacing industries and reorganizing the waterfront while opening the path for urban renewal. Charlene Mires elucidates the potential that the project carried for real estate markets across the United States, documenting how municipalities and states competed to host the new organization. She demonstrates that architects, planners, and politicians all entered the planning for the UN Headquarters with different intentions and agendas, in the process shaping and refining ideas around the role that the physical headquarters would play for both the organization and the hosting cities.21 But having an impact on an urban scale—which the UN undoubtedly ended up having—does not necessarily mean that this is what the organization’s architects and diplomats had in mind. Quite to the contrary, I argue, the UN Headquarters was a building ultimately designed from the inside out.

To discuss the UN Headquarters, we also need to address the spatial histories and politics of diplomacy. Historians have explored in detail diplomatic architectures produced for the political economies of national contexts.22 Jane Loeffler, for example, shows how the U.S. State Department developed a complicated building program of embassy architecture for cultural imperialism, embedding U.S. intelligence and administration across the world.23 She explains that these architectures, reflecting shifts in foreign policy and diplomatic agendas, moved away from purportedly open configurations in space to embrace highly controlled and closed space typologies. But multilateral institutions require a move beyond questions of national representation, especially if one is to address the political and aesthetic challenge of internationalism within a broadening multimodal world, where nations constituted only the modular parts of a larger system of diplomacy.

Declarations of the complex as a monument or a symbol of peace, often delivered by diplomats and politicians to the press, speak to the incentives but fail to register the gap between ideals and realization. I maintain that these debates inadvertently produced a new kind of monumentality centered on infrastructures of work and circulation rather than symbolic forms. Underway was a hesitation toward monumental scale and a desire for a space to present diplomacy as grounded and democratic.

My story shares intellectual and structural affinities with architectural histories of bureaucracies and corporations, although it covers an entirely different organization, the United Nations.24 More than spaces of governance, these public interiors reflected a profound belief in the capacity of management and organization theories to figure out systems of world order, ultimately harnessing new technologies of communication to implement them. Histories of development, environmentalism, immigration, and reconstruction demonstrate the entanglements of the organization with policy, planning, and the control and management of technical knowledge, arguing that the international institution’s power and value lies as much in paper as in stone.25 Yet, maybe with the exception of Lucia Allais’s interrogation of UNESCO’s architectural form and the corridor politics of cultural diplomacy, we have yet to understand and convey how the Headquarters’ architecture and spatial politics participated in shaping the UN’s organization mechanism at work. To do so, I interrogate the tactics of institutional internationalism vis-à-vis the cultures of assembly and governance that architectural and spatial decisions helped implement on the ground.

Diplomatic Interiors and the Public Sphere

This book delves into design histories of diplomatic interiors and the political power they frame. Interiors order power and relationships, governing through the organization of life and political representation. Design scholars and historians, who research partnerships between designers and governments, speak of the “political agency” of objects and their capacity to articulate meaning.26 Others show how politicians and diplomats used design as a backdrop to ideological debates over social organization.27 And others illustrate how interior design and furniture acted as agents of foreign policy to steer publics away from communism, practicing what Joseph Nye calls the “soft power” of culture.28 More recently, Iris Moon has noted the political significance of interiors vis-à-vis “imperial ideology.” Bringing attention to Napoleonic interiors, Moon argues that interior design historically allowed empires to claim sovereignty and power even with limited resources.29 When employed in the service of colonial powers, she states, interiors install images of sovereignty and models of government, even if there is no building to enclose them, as was the case in the famous Napoleonic tent (an icon of nomadic life that Muammar Gaddafi mobilized from the grounds of Donald Trump’s estate to antagonize the 2009 UN General Assembly and its diplomacy).30 This book takes up this conception of the interior as an agent of political power to examine how it served (and articulated) liberal internationalism in global institutions.

The UN deployed global interiors to produce and reproduce its institutional approach to liberal internationalism. Although a public space in its constitution, the United Nations Headquarters purported to make a “home” for this new global polity. This mashing up of the private and public sphere might initially appear as an anomaly to the liberal order that institutes itself on the separation of the two.31 But maybe it is not, particularly since the global interior, although presenting itself as a public sphere, lacks the political capacity to reinforce its own resolutions. In this sense it is a space that reproduces, for the most part, the orders and hegemonies that shape it, even when they shift.

Social histories and histories of science implicate interiors with architectures of power deployed in laboratories, courtrooms, and prisons.32 These accounts remind us that interiors have not only been the domain of home economics, but also of state power. Behind that spatial research lies the specter of Michel Foucault, who in his own study of knowledge and power used those spaces and the way they organized bodies as hermeneutic tools to examine apparatuses of social control and their shifting paradigms. My book builds on this articulation of interiors as political sites of power sanctioning, at the same time that it departs from the Foucauldian model to argue for the representational value of global forums as media through which the UN constructs and circulates certain forms of social organization endemic to the institution’s operational logic.

Peter Sloterdijk places interiors at the center of capitalist development, which he argues started with the colonization of the Americas. Sloterdijk claims that interiors are a symptom of and a tool for capitalism’s expansion. It is through interiors that the “most effective totalization” took place; he points to the spheres of the self, the traveling pods (and cultures) of settler colonialism, and the stadiums and assembly halls of the new mass public.33 Sloterdijk’s interior is a means to resolve the paradox of a global assembly. He maintains that a democratic “world interior” is an oxymoron, since the world constitutes a “non-assemblable entity” that cannot gather in one place. Therefore, he says, democratic governance can only be organized in parts, as a system of subordinate structures. “One can observe that everything has a capacity for congress,” he asserts, “except for the whole,” which for him is the hallmark of the tragedy of the social in an era of globalized markets.34 The UN interiors similarly promise expansion of the organization’s publics while struggling with the desire to engage the world. This was a drive and conundrum that mobilized architectural decisions even when architects ended up delivering the world only as a denotative representation.

At the same time, I complicate previous readings of the post-1945 condition as the “closed world” or the “inner world” to explain that the exclusionary forces at play were predicated upon a promise and an invitation to engage, albeit remotely, with world affairs.35 The Headquarters framed the political activity of the United Nations, but also endowed the organization with metaphors of transparency and equity on a global scale even while concealing liberal political and economic forces installing new asymmetries in the background.

Most importantly, diplomats and bureaucrats used UN interiors to bring a global polity within the mechanisms of liberal internationalism, an effort to create an international public around U.S. ideas about democratic structures. World War II and the masses-as-publics of the Third Reich forced thinkers, politicians, and sociologists of the time to rethink public life. Fred Turner notes that these conversations had started in the United States among a group of anthropologists, educators, designers, and artists who, taken aback by the success of Adolf Hitler’s indoctrination, set out to research modes of cultivating the “democratic” persona and its attributes.36 Explorations of how publics form and transform proliferated in postwar political theory. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt theorized the public realm as the space of politics-making, constituted by its separation from the domestic sphere, although dependent upon it.37 Just three years later, Jürgen Habermas described “the public sphere” as the spaces (theaters, coffee shops, and so on) and media (newspapers, books) where the emerging bourgeoisie addressed public concerns despite and at times antagonistically to the state.38 According to this genealogy of political thinking, the formation of publics entails (and is entangled with) certain spatial configurations of the social.39

Rather than disregarding UN interiors as solely vestiges of institutional power—which they also are—I approach those spaces as platforms for speech acts and moments of articulation within the aggregation of systems and networks that constitute the UN. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate that, during the building of the UN (both the institution and the actual Headquarters) interiors constituted critical nodes that structured key functions of the new world order, while allowing counter-alliances to form and claim the stage, bringing about new systems for producing international publics.

Of Media Infrastructures and World Orders

Media and communications infrastructures feature centrally in architectural figurations of the global interior, tethering the interior to the exterior world. When deliberations over the UN’s organizational structure pivoted toward a centralized institution with an expansive reach, diplomatic discourse introduced communications as both the metaphor and structuring principle to network institutions and people beyond national borders and regions. Channels of communication connected the main organs within the UN, as well as the organization with its specialized agencies, member states, local publics, and international institutions outside the UN frame.

This idea of communications-as-structure is not new. In his field-defining Empire and Communications (1950), political economist and media scholar Harold Innis held that empires and media coarticulate one another.40 Communication systems built around cod, timber, and fur in Canada, he noted, defined the operational characteristics of empire and established hegemonies.41 Media histories, emboldened by calls to unearth the longer historical and material processes that frame the emergence of media, have been pinpointing communications’ continuous entanglement with colonial politics.42 Winseck and Pike, in particular, demonstrate how communications infrastructures such as postal and telegraph services enabled colonial strategies that tied metropoles with peripheries in administrative and economic ways.43 In her research on telecommunications networks, Starosielski locates the foundation of Internet infrastructures back in the imperial routes that forged the way for an initially telephonic and later fiberoptic flow of information.44 Borrowing from the colonial playbook, I argue, the UN established itself through communications systems, with architecture feeding this sprawling system moments of ordering representation and coherence.

The United Nations communications infrastructures and its logic had also been epistemologically grounded in military techniques and practices. Media scholars have been describing the ways in which applications and theories developed during World War II formed the epistemological basis that transformed not only information theory and computer science, but also how scientists understood language and communications writ large. Lisa Parks implicates military technology in the development of a global communications systems and the production of the world citizen as “remotely present” and “globally mobile.”45 The UN’s infrastructures of communication did not develop outside this military-industrial complex, but rather within, with UN bureaucrats actively seeking military advice on information systems, transfusing military knowhow into the UN’s modalities of engaging and organizing publics for peace.

Military ideas also informed conversations on governance and social structures, most notably in the immediate aftermath of Norbert Wiener’s publications and the Macy Conferences. Sociologist and cybernetician Karl Deutsch, who spent a good amount of his career studying political structures, urged political theorists and sociologists to approach the question of government not so much as “a problem of power,” but rather as “a problem of steering” and a “matter of communication.”46 Governments, as historians of science show, deployed similar ideas about communication and control to organize administrative and executive branches of government, transforming technocratic states across Europe and North America.47 This idea of governing as steering, I argue, was fundamental to the imaginary constitution of the UN, allowing bureaucrats to plan the new organization as simultaneously an organism and a communications technology.

Information—its production, management, and circulation—has been and remains at the core of the UN’s mission. The UN’s communications apparatus builds on earlier twentieth-century information science pioneers—Patrick Geddes, Otto Neurath, and Paul Otlet—and their globalist attempts to create a universal system for the storage and circulation of information.48 The introduction of standards and regulation that this unification of the sciences resulted in has been dwelled upon in the history of science and technology.49 These accounts demonstrate how an internationalist imperative, promulgated by expanding global markets, shaped the media and techniques whose universality we take for granted, installing rational structures that connect scientists and laboratories across institutional and national boundaries. Tools, media techniques, and standards, often embedded within local contexts, not only coordinated but also ordered a global knowledge production. Think here of the Dewey library classification system, or artificial languages and standardized measurement units.50 Building on those interrogations of the media of internationalism, this book explores how the architecture of global interiors shaped the rules of engagement and exchange in multilateral institutions.

Until recently, international institutions and organizations stood outside the scope of media studies, with scholars tentatively addressing them as sites of implementation and carriers of media practices and techniques developed elsewhere. Jonas Brendebach, Martin Herzer, and Heidi Tworek broke this pattern to open up an important conversation on the intersection of media and international institutions.51 They argue that debates over communications and their techniques shaped the diplomatic imaginary, especially as international institutions were adopting a functionalist approach that targeted shared interests and problems to connect states within structured systems.52 They note that international institutions steered media to massage public opinion at a time when their existence and operational success depended on it. Just a few years earlier, during the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, panoramic interiors used media to create the “world of tomorrow” as a spectacle. By 1945, desires for rational and effective structures of communication emerged to organize the political spaces of appearance and their representations. This book expands this work to show that the design of the global interior at the UN sought to shape public opinion as much as the news circulating the organization’s expansive—and unstable—media infrastructure, schematizing for the public the image of postwar institutional multilateralism.

Reckoning with media and publics in the age of globalization, sociologists have been pointing to the networked form that the globalized public sphere has been acquiring, directly connecting global polities with communications theories.53 Manuel Castells, whose work on The Network Society brought him inside the UN, professed that the emergence of a global civil society and a network state require a “communication space” for global diplomacy, where “a new, common language could emerge as a precondition for diplomacy, so that when the time for diplomacy comes, it reflects not only interests and power making but also meaning and sharing.”54 Joining Castells, Danielle Allen deemed the older spatial metaphors of the “public sphere” inadequate frameworks for analyzing the dynamic systems of communication behind polities.55 Yet, this book claims that, even in their aspiration to launch an ever-expanding and interconnected system of institutions, UN bureaucrats anchored those networks in the very physical space of global interiors. Those interiors defined the “communication space” the organization enabled at its core, ultimately spatializing before liquefying international publics.

Another way of addressing these UN platforms would be to examine them as “mediascapes,” horizontal structures that organize and are organized by media. Mediascapes, Appadurai explains, enable “global cultural flows.” They are situated and relational; they are messy outcomes of a complex set of institutional, corporate, and multinational actors. By bringing together infrastructures and representations, he notes, mediascapes create “the image of the world,” with all their disjuncture, contradictions, and situatedness.56 Thinking of the UN Headquarters as a “mediascape” brings attention to the media institution of global governance, but also to the nodal and organizational function that the architecture of those public interiors played. The architecture of those global interiors, I argue, not only organized media in space, but—with media in mind—delivered a critical representation of world organization and its publics of multilateralism as a coherent and graspable reality at work, rather than an abstract figment of imagination. This was a meaningful representation that also held the organization—an otherwise disparate and waggling body of agencies and organs—together. In that sense, the UN Headquarters and its global interiors participate as nodes within a much larger mediascape they aspire to create. These global interiors deliver a “structuring structure” for world order and for political representation.57

To produce the UN mediascape, diplomats and architects turned to broadcast and film studios. These studios offered palpable solutions to the programmatic and typological problem that the UN Headquarters presented. Lynn Spigel, Brian Jacobson, and other media scholars have discussed how studio architecture—either for television or film—created imaginaries by concealing the labor, service, and infrastructure supporting whatever is taking place on stage.58 Broadcast studios taught the architects planning the Headquarters, I hold, how to introduce the hierarchies necessary in the production of images of world order without compromising calls to phenomenal transparency and political integrity. Studying the translation of those broadcast and recording architectures allows us to unpack the theatrical politics and logics of spectatorship embedded within the UN interiors, as well as the audience cultures they cultivated.

At the same time, media within those platforms, I claim, did not only structure the public sphere visually, but also acoustically. Kate Lacey demonstrates that listening is formative, if not constitutive of publics. Media technologies such as the radio and the phonograph historically transformed the terms of participation in public life, essentially producing “listening publics.”59 Extending Lacey’s view on listening practices and public formation to the spaces of the United Nations points to the role that acoustics played in the institution of the international public sphere.

Not all acoustic spaces, however, are the same. Nor are they all driven by the same political imperatives. Exploring how the Third Reich deployed acoustic strategies for propaganda, Carolyn Birdsall poignantly identifies the totalitarian implications of the centralized and amplified soundscapes of Nazi Party rallies in Germany.60 These soundscapes often form the historical past against which new soundscapes emerge. A case in point is Fred Turner’s historical account of the “democratic surround,” where he shows how, in response to the apprehended fear of totalitarianism, U.S. educational and cultural institutions did away with centralized configurations and master narratives, producing multimedia and multifocal environments for museums and galleries. Those attempts at a “democratic surround” fed individuated experiences and celebrated subjective interpretation and synthesis of information.61 The UN was not an exception to the democratic imperative. In fact, UN engineers and architects similarly conceived the soundscape of global interiors as a response and an antithesis to the totalitarian soundscapes of the Third Reich, often being particularly wary of the political economies that high reverberation rates evoked.

These spaces differed from the concert halls and theaters that Emily Thompson and others examine in histories of modern architectural acoustics in North America and Europe. Rather than being built for music and its diffusion throughout space, the UN’s global interiors aimed to transmit intelligibly and clearly the spoken word at the podium or the table.62 Debate and assembly required a thorough yet different consideration of sound in terms of communication and transmission. These were (and still are), after all, sites where conversations, debates, and filibusters happened against the environmental noise of the infrastructure that supported them: air-conditioning systems, typewriters, and the noise of the city. Architects and designers spatialized these acoustic relationships, defining who enunciates and who listens, but they also used this language of amplification and transmission to imagine the UN as a broadcast architecture.63

International in their constitution, the UN’s global interiors posed in addition the problem of language. Unlike national public spheres that often use a single official language, the UN’s global interiors required a system to organize its multilingual diplomatic landscape in ways that ensured communication. The utopia that the UN aimed to be was telephonic. Simultaneous interpretation systems, often tying delegates to interpreters with a telephonic network, constitute an essential element of the global interior. I examine how these telephonic publics, stratified and complex as they were, transformed the UN fora. So apart from visual literacy, I argue, we need an acoustemological approach to understand the politics behind the design of the voice of the world.64

Situating Communications

I approach the UN spaces of diplomacy and international relations as indexical sites that embed and represent the organization’s politics while also informing them. My goal is to interrogate the coproduction of the organization and its sites while studying how architecture imagined the space of global organization and assembly, ultimately shaping cultures of multilateralism in their temporary and permanent sites. I use “sites” as a hermeneutic tool that opens architectural inquiry to the social structures and cultural forms intertwined with the making of those spaces. Unlike buildings, sites can be closed or open, feature buildings or appear empty, be enveloped by architectural form or encounter it.65 International affairs and global diplomacy happen in situ, even when this involves two strangers holding a telephone conversation from their offices within an embassy. Site analysis brings forth both the historical depth of the forms of political assembly mobilized and the breadth of epistemic cultures that were invited to order them. The diplomats and architects who worked at the site, as well as the engineers and bureaucrats, carried with them their own imaginary constructions of governmental structures, internationalist significations, and representations of universality that ultimately found their way into the form of the building. Hence, my job here is to examine how these conversations arrived and were woven into the site of global governance so as to understand the relationships that the United Nations hoped to implement and how these are different from or similar to the representations that were communicated to the public.

Pierre Bourdieu urges us to closely examine how social systems inhabit space. Through the study of the spatial configuration of power and hierarchy, he argues, we can gain insights into social stratifications at play, as well as the distribution of resources and power that enforce them.66 In this sense space is a sort of sociological evidence. Yet built structures also determine in a way how power and publics form. Narratives that focus on professional actors say more about the social construction of value in modern architecture and its historiography, and less about how a massive international institution used its headquarters and media to come into being. To understand the headquarters as a site of liberal internationalism is to examine the practices that structured it, but also the ones it aspired to shape. Although the primary focus of this book remains the UN, the framework is expanded to include the conversations and debates that resulted in the mythmaking of liberal internationalism, which I argue starts with the theatrical construction of the spaces of political representation. In this sense, I treat the UN as an aggregation of sites of operations, exchanges, translations, and representations, an aggregation that I study through its global interiors, the spaces where the organization appeared to a global public.

Architectures of Global Governance: A History

The United Nations Headquarters was not the first time that architects got involved in the configuration of the spaces of international institutions. Attempts at global governance have been stirring up architectural debates on world capitals since the Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, when mostly European colonial powers pursued more permanent forms of international organization and world order to replace older imperial structures.67 A 1904 architectural competition gave Louis-Marie Cordonnier the opportunity to design the Peace Palace, the seat for the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that the steel mogul and internationalist Andrew Carnegie funded believing, like other industrialists and businessmen of his time, that institutionalized international law and bilateral arbitration treaties would benefit the globalization of markets.68 Architects and planners injected themselves into these conversations, proposing capitols and entire cities where an international body of bureaucrats would organize and administer policies, imagining sites of cultural, artistic, and scientific exchange. They repurposed old conversations on model cities and Beaux Arts projects for parliaments and people’s palaces, evoking a mostly abstracted and transcendental cosmopolitanism, as Shiben Banerji notes.69

In these projects, the city was the medium of “peace” and “internationalism.” Alfred Fenzl, who proposed a Peace Congress Palace on the Island of Lacroma (1900), described his project as a communication apparatus in and of itself, “radiating electric light at night and signaling the message of salvation and peace to the wide world.”70 Similarly, Dutch theosophist and architect Karel Petrus Cornelis de Bazel imagined a world city-broadcast in The Hague, where “ideas that originate in the heart of the world radiate from it.”71 But it was Ernest Hébrard’s and Hendrik Christian Andersen’s World Centre of Communication (1913), a project generously supported by Andersen’s sister-in-law and matron of the project Olivia Cushing Andersen, that tied communications with the project of internationalism.72 Their idealistic world center proposed a city, where a global community of scholars, scientists, and artists would take on world peace. Hébrard repurposed the Rue des Nations of World Expositions for museums, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions.73 Systems of transportation such as roads and railways wove the landscape together, connecting the site via cars, carriages, and boats.74 There, Gabriel Leroux forestalled architecture as the “signals” and “signs” to carry the project of world conscience.75 Part homage to the Tower of Babel, part celebration of towers and spires as communication technologies, and part evocation of wireless communications, a Tower of Progress at the city center ever more forcefully placed media and communications at the heart of the internationalist imperative in the beginning of the twentieth century (Figure I.3, I.4). Andersen’s indefatigable attempts at creating traction around his ideas repeatedly failed, but the end of the World War I found architectural journals revisiting the project as a model for the future of global governance, calling it “prophetic” and a well-fitted model for the future of institutional internationalism.76

The announcement of the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I propelled architects to think about the spaces of global assembly and their interiors, responding to a series of studio briefs in architecture schools and later on to the competition for the Palais des Nations. The Académie des Beaux-Arts and its U.S. branch, the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects, both issued calls for capitols that yielded palatial neoclassical proposals for corridor diplomacy.77 The 1926 competition brief for a Palais des Nations reinforced the idea of a centralized global governance, anticipating the concentration of all League of Nations organizations and institutions on one site. The brief described the Plenary Hall as a public global interior that would accommodate an audience of 2,600 participants, with press and general public outnumbering the convening delegates, challenging architects to consider the forums of the new international organization in terms of communications.78

However, the prioritization of press and radio that the League diplomats imagined had little impact on most entries. At the time, architects considered communications for the most part a technical rather than a design question. In an otherwise conservative pool of competition entries that for the most part firmly grounded the new world order in the old, the design of the Plenary Hall was the only place to steer a conversation on communications.79 As Sabine von Fischer notes, the Assembly Hall presented an acoustic challenge that diplomats already thought of as cardinal to the operation of the organization.80 The body politic could not assert its operations without establishing communication. In a detailed report for The American Architect acoustician F. M. Osswald, who condemned the majority of the entries as acoustically problematic, proposed the reduction of the overall size (which inevitably happened) and the use of a loudspeaker system for the controlled diffusion of speech (Figure I.5).81

But signs of an architecture of internationalism that conceives itself as a broadcast infrastructure appeared in Hannes Meyer’s and Hans Wittwer’s proposal (Figure I.6). With its glass dome and literal transparency, the proposal stood out for its appearance and externalized tectonics, in ways that underpinned the desire for a new relationship between publics and bodies of governance.82 The entry featured a radio station on the roof and a news billboard on the exterior of the building, giving architectural form to the communication machine that international institutions aspired to be. Meyer believed the League to be one of the “expressive forms of modern social agglomerations,” with press and radio serving its internationalist goals of cooperation.83

Architectural historians have extensively documented the story of the competition and the crisis of judgment that ensued.84 What is of interest is that this crisis of judgment pushed a group of diplomats to engineer a “Board of Design” consisting of the architects behind the winning entries, a model of collaboration that UN bureaucrats expanded and put to work. Henri Paul Nénot and Julien Flegenheimer were invited to revise their entry with the help of Carlo Broggi, Camille Lefèbvre, and Joseph Vago. The final team also oversaw the construction and decorative program.85

Architects continued treating the forums of international organizations as secondary to the exterior design of the headquarters, focusing almost exclusively on setting capitol complexes on the urban scale. During the ten years that the design and construction of the Palais took, new proposals for adjacent international institutions articulated the communications imperative that the League’s architects did not.86 Building on Andersen’s and Hébrard’s World Centre of Communication, Belgian lawyers and pacifists Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine proposed the creation of a Cité mondiale, an informational infrastructure for knowledge storage and circulation in the form of a global city.87 They invited Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, whose League of Nations proposal was dismissed on a technicality, to give form to their project so as to propose it as an annex to the Palais des Nations.88 Sprawled on the hillside of Lake Geneva beside the Palais des Nations, the Mundaneum complex, as they named it, would feature a prominent urban core with a gigantic ziggurat to host the World Museum, a proposal that was never realized (Figure I.7).89

The Palais des Nations in Geneva opened its doors to diplomats and the public in 1937, just three years before World War II would force the League to close them again. It left the architectural press relatively unimpressed, with some journals calling the complete project a fittingly “unfortunate disfigurement of a noble idea.”90 Although we think otherwise, the criticism was not unilateral. Some architects found the complex well-designed and functional. Howard Robertson, who would later join the team overseeing the UN Headquarters design, called the League’s headquarters a utilitarian complex and complimented the design board for the tempering of “architectural oratory.”91 There were even critics, such as Alberto Sartoris, who recognized in it an emergent modernism, albeit not fully developed.92 Yet after World War II, architects and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art would publicly claim the League of Nations and its palace as the absolute opposite of what the UN Headquarters should look like.

During World War II, architects in the United States and abroad redirected their focus on the war front and reconstruction projects, as Jean-Louis Cohen shows.93 That, however, did not halt conversations on international organization and communications. By 1942, a new organization, the United Nations Information Organization (UNIO), appeared, pledging to coordinate the circulation of news with a network of broadcast companies and news agencies. An outgrowth of the Inter-Allied Information Committee and the British Ministry of Information, UNIO systematized the clearing and distribution of press releases, broadcast programming, newsreels, and posters. The goal was to bolster support for the various war fronts but also further cultivate an internationalist sentiment around the world. The agency offered its library of photographs and images for the publication of pamphlets and posters, but also teamed up with cultural institutions such as MoMA to install exhibitions that propagated a cosmopolitan affect (Figure I.8). The Road to Victory (1942) and The Airways to Peace (1943), two traveling exhibitions designed by the Bauhaus émigré Herbert Bayer, expressed clearly this educational drive. If The Road to Victory aimed to strengthen patriotism and invite visitors on a one-way trip to world peace (mitigated, of course, by the U.S. military-industrial complex), then The Airways to Peace, with its open globetrotting panorama and Wendell Willkie quotes, effectually placed U.S. audiences at the center of a new connected world (Figure I.9). UNIO planted the seed for a reconceptualization of international institutions as mechanisms, and indeed communications apparatuses. This reconceptualization would also transform how the emergent organization would understand and articulate its relationship to the international community in space, in a new type of form, the global interior.

The Book in a Sketch

Chapter 1 examines how architects and designers, responding to the introduction of mass media and the call for transparency on an international scale, reconceived the UN spaces of international organization as stages with representational value. Unlike the early meetings in Dumbarton Oaks, where delegates met behind closed doors and design served as a visualization tool for administrators to debate, in San Francisco the UN sought to open its doors to the public eye and ear from its first moment. In doing so, the organization also invited a reconsideration of the symbols of internationalism and unity. In Nuremberg, the IBM telephonic system of interpretation organized the publics of international law, while constructing communications as central to the endeavor of liberal internationalism.

Chapter 2 explores how architects transferred the spatial systems and structures from the San Francisco Conference on International Organization and the Nuremberg Trials to the design of the UN Headquarters. The decision to favor a “headquarters” over a “world capital” for the seat of the new institution heralded a shift of focus from symbols to systems, and from centralized to networked models of organization. UN architects sought to install an infrastructural aesthetic that presented the UN as a communications organism and diplomatic labor as collaborative work in progress. I also discuss the emergence of new cultures of assembly and convening that the institution exported outside its Headquarters, showing how architecture and media framed political conversations and structured diplomatic labor.

Chapter 3 notes that global interiors, insulated from their immediate context, re-established their connection to a global polity in terms of a regulated network of communication channels. Focusing on the design of the General Assembly, I demonstrate how, to ensure the intelligibility of the voice-as-signal, engineers and architects had to insulate the UN Headquarters from the outside, and its global platforms from external noise. I trace the acoustic design of the UN’s headquarters back to military research on airplane communication systems and anechoic chambers. Media technologies such as the telephone, simultaneous interpretation systems, and the radio featured prominently in the public spaces of the UN, demonstrating the presence of a system that not only ordered the body politic, but also connected delegates with the rest of the bureaucratic machine and governments with publics outside those interiors. The goal was to establish the General Assembly as a site of both global and democratic listening and speaking.

Chapter 4 examines how the UN mobilized workshops, experts, and exhibitions to establish new communication channels and to plant the organization in the decolonizing world. Technical experts in seminars and conferences articulated the UN’s ideas of political representation and procedure, which they carried from the Headquarters. In this sense I also consider how the distinction between the headquarters and the field instigated the communications systems of the UN.

The spatial apparatus of the global interior carried on to define multilateralism and governmental cultures in a variety of settings, from courtrooms to conference halls, delivering a new spatial vocabulary of communication and international organization. For global citizens around the world, those public interiors that assembled the United Nations coincided with the image of a modern cosmopolitanism, turning its furniture and interior design into hallmarks of internationalist projections and aspirations. Commercial films and television series recast those interiors as the sites of global governance for public consumption. But, also, these interiors transformed into a convening technique of internationalism that cross-contaminated organizations and ordered sites of multilateral exchange beyond its headquarters. My hope is that, in examining how diplomats and architects produced and used the UN global interiors, we will understand the role that architecture played in imagining and designing the assembly of national governments in a liberal world order. And maybe in doing so we will also learn something about what kind of space this mid-century utopia we call the UN forum is, and who it might serve.