Staging the World

Designing World Organization

At the dawn of 1945, newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. turned to General William J. Donovan with a quite simple request. At the time Donovan was heading the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the military intelligence division that Franklin D. Roosevelt had launched in 1942 for the production and circulation of information regarding various war fronts in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. The State Department was engrossed in preparatory work for a new international organization, the United Nations, and Colonel Atherton Richards, formerly with the Office of the Coordinator of Information and president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, had tipped off Stettinius about the new presentation techniques developed within the OSS Presentation Branch. The Dumbarton Oaks Conversations had just concluded with the outline of a possible organizational structure for the UN, and a call for a larger conference at San Francisco to iron out and sign the charter. The State Department was also preparing the ground for the prosecution of Third Reich leaders, the trial that was anticipated to launch a more robust postwar international legal system with the preliminary blessings of Dumbarton Oaks. Stettinius asked Donovan to “loan” him illustrators, architects, and designers—at the time working for the War Department—for a number of projects the State Department was carrying out on “internal organization and management,” “international conferences,” “public relations,” and “foreign policy.”2 He assured Donovan that the projects were of utmost importance to the United States, hence the urgency of the loan. The invitation did not give further specifications, but it sparked a frantic search for prospective personnel and a research trip to New York City to secure new hires for the Presentation Branch and the State Department.3

Design played an important role in the OSS, translating military intelligence produced by the Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch into valuable visual output for war operations.4 The Presentation Branch, a hotbed of design and architecture within OSS, offered the R&A scientists “who had the facts and knew their meaning” a necessary “bridge” with the War Department generals “who needed the facts as a basis for decision and action.”5 In this sense, as Barry Katz expertly demonstrates, OSS architects, along with artists, illustrators, and designers, partook in intelligence production, supplying the military with tactical sabotage drawings, maps, flow charts, films, diagrams, and their architectures of presentation (situation and presentation rooms).6 The State Department, anxious to see the UN successfully launched, entrusted OSS and the military with its presentation to the world.

OSS visualization techniques short-circuited disciplinary boundaries and translated field-specific expertise and language for a military audience in similar ways that corporations communicated with management, and advertisers with clients. The idea was not particularly new. As Gestalt theories infiltrated design education and practice, industrialists endowed their companies with dedicated design departments for the creation of recognizable corporate identities and advertisements.7 The idea was that design can circumvent the limitations of language and successfully broaden one’s audience and market. Think here, for example, how social scientists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Otto Neurath used visualization methods and design to reach larger audiences: Du Bois to demonstrate the structural nature of racism and Neurath to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy in governmental educational campaigns.8 These projects paved the way for the use of design as a universal language.

With the San Francisco Conference fast approaching, why couldn’t these same techniques also get past the problem of language at a moment that the institution considered foundational? The Presentation Branch’s visual communications work received glowing accolades from the military. Charts and maps had helped the War Department to comprehend and communicate a complex military operation with many shifting constituents, but also to convince Congress’s politicians and solicit economic support for its projects. Couldn’t designers and architects, State Department officials wondered, play a similar role in securing peace for a new world order? Although apprehensive, they saw in design the ability to condense and communicate core ideas, values, and structures across expertise and language barriers. Unlike, however, their work for the War Department, at San Francisco designers would have to design and communicate, to literally give form, to a plan in the making. The Presentation Branch’s ability to present as real an organization still in “somebody’s imagination” was not only alluring to governmental officials, but also constitutive of the new institution.9

The State Department put together a Conference Secretariat to organize and run the San Francisco Conference on International Organization. Alger Hiss, the State Department administrator and executive secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, later accused of espionage, was appointed the Secretary-General of the conference. On the administrative side, the group of State Department officials supporting Hiss’s planning included Charles E. Rothwell, Secretary-General of the U.S. delegation to the UN; Leo Pasvolsky, the Wilsonian chairman of the Coordination Committee at the San Francisco Conference; and Clyde Dunn. Meanwhile, Warren Kelchner from the State Department Division for International Conferences would collaborate with the OSS team on etiquette and procedure.10

On the design side, Oliver Lincoln Lundquist, an award-winning architect in his mid-twenties who had dropped out of Columbia University to join Raymond Loewy’s industrial design office during the Great Depression, was appointed Presentation Officer.11 Lundquist, who OSS filmmaker and writer Carl Marzani called the “idea man at large,” had arrived at the War Department early in 1941, eventually enlisting in OSS’s Presentation Branch.12 His early work included illustrations and charts, as well as commissioned presentations for the War Department. Lundquist arranged with Hubert (Hu) Barton, Presentation Branch Chief at the time, to have OSS loan his buddy Donal (Mac) McLaughlin, divisional head of the Graphic Division, who had left Loewy’s office to join OSS in 1942.13 A third-generation architect from New York City, McLaughlin had attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and Yale, apprenticing at the Atelier Lloyd Morgan and the Atelier Corbett-Smith.14 After a short stint at the National Park Service drawing maps and park structures, followed by post office designs for the Treasury Department and plans for greenbelt towns for the Resettlement Administration, he had moved to Walter Dorwin Teague’s and later Raymond Loewy’s office, where he designed interiors, exhibits, and dioramas for department stores and the 1939 New York World’s Fair.15 Both Lundquist and McLaughlin had impressed the War Department generals and colonels with their animation techniques.16

For the San Francisco crew Hu Barton also enlisted an impressive roster of talented architects, artists, illustrators, and editors: former editor of Viking Press and Modern Age Books, David Zablodowsky headed the Editorial Division,17 and film director Richard (Dick) Wilson served as the photographic officer.18 The team supported OSS historian Marian Emrich, public opinion analyst-turned-communications professor Edward Norton Barnhart, and literary scholar James D. Hart, with the generous administrative support of Marie Barton and Ruth Mandelbaum. Pamphlets, plans, and charts were prepared by a stellar line-up of artists that included New Deal muralist Eric Mose, celebrated children’s book illustrator Joe Krush, African American television graphic designer Georg Olden, modernist landscape architect Lou Bernard Voight, abstract painter Charlotte Park, caricaturist Sam Berman, and illustrator Alice Provensen, to name a few.19 By general admission, the team worked well together as a “congenial gang of brains, good humor, and a progressive orientation.”20

If design was the means through which the organization would acquire form and structure in front of its delegates, architecture would be the medium to give this new organization and its international public sphere a stage. The conference would be hosted at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building, a pair of neoclassical buildings in front of the City Hall that Arthur Brown Jr. had designed to replace the earlier hall destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. These twin buildings comprised a municipally owned complex that was at once war memorial, cultural institution, and epicenter of the local political and cultural elite (Figure 1.1).21 The Opera House would accommodate the opening addresses and the plenary sessions, while the Veterans Building, serving as the headquarters of the Conference Secretariat, would conclude the conference with the ceremonial signing of the Charter.22 The choice of venues revealed a yearning for theatricality and staging that the Presentation Branch minutes confirm. During those “production meetings”—a willful fusion of film industry and show-business parlance with diplomacy—the Presentation Branch designated “staging” as the main task, particularly in relation to the design of the plenary hall and the setting for the signing of the Charter. OSS architects and designers would not only support the conference in material and technical ways: they would produce it.23

And in all truth, the San Francisco Conference was conceived as a media event for an international public, admitted in a structured way that designated levels of access. The Conference Secretariat limited public admission to representatives of international organizations, both UN–affiliated and nongovernmental, leaving very little opportunity for the general public to enter this new global space. Instead, the place of the general public would be taken by photographers, filming crews, and journalists, who were offered prominent but organized placement within the galleries, removed from the floor yet with abundant access to the proceedings (Figure 1.2). The Veterans Building would accommodate press and mass media, offering office space for journalists, studios for radio broadcasting networks, as well as full telephone, telegraph, and radio services for wireless and cable messages. In addition, the Presentation Branch installed a pressroom on the second floor for interviews with statespersons, and cleared three boxes in the Opera House galleries opposite the center stage for the newsreel crews of Pathé, Paramount, and Universal, while bringing along Hollywood pioneer Peter Mole to supervise stage lighting for filming (Figure 1.3).24 In this sense, the presence of mass media was ubiquitous and ultimately determinative of the organization’s claims to globality and authority.

In designing the stages of the UN’s constitutive moments, the Presentation Branch directed how and what media representatives (and by extension, the world) would see. During the preparatory meetings in Washington, the presence of mass media had challenged OSS architects and designers to bring front and center questions of visual identity. The organization needed to not only build those international platforms for multilateralism, but also to turn them into representations of the institution itself. State Department and UN bureaucrats anticipated that design would authoritatively frame the organization for its publics.

At the San Francisco Conference, the Presentation Branch repurposed the streamlined aesthetic of industrial design for the pictorial needs of the postwar world order.25 The full list of design tasks ahead—some identified by the designers themselves and others commissioned by the State Department—included passes, press badges, admission buttons, nameplates, handbooks and guidebooks. No matter how small the task, Lundquist assigned a team of editors and designers to address it, with State Department officials and R&A analysts intervening with feedback at critical production stages. The result was the creation of dedicated teams with affixed leaders, while artists, architects, and writers moved from one team to the next depending on need, availability, and priorities. Apart from staging the conference, designers transformed those objects of assembly into material signifiers of the larger world structure that representatives, journalists, and politicians entered when passing the conference gates. Together those objects would make up the visual language of internationalism, presenting as coherent an organization that was yet to have a body.

Among those tasks was the translation of the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals into communicable schematics to guide the conversations inside committee rooms and the plenary hall.26 In an attempt to control the negotiations, the State Department had asked the pamphlet designers to schematize the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations in diagrams. The task was to outline the overall organizational structure without, however, presenting it as fixed or detailing hierarchies among organs. In addition, the State Department called for diagrams and charts to depict a democratic, decentralized, nonhierarchical structure, regardless of initial conversations indicating the prominent place of the Security Council within the institution. In fact, the goal was to visually downplay the centrality of the Security Council and instead emphasize the General Assembly. Published in a pamphlet, the diagrams set each organ on a radial flow chart to describe its role and place within the organization. These radial flow charts illustrated the diffusion of authority and power among the three main organs at the time—the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice—while graphically communicating the new organization as a collaborative enterprise. The intention behind, and the result of, the ask was to separate the reality from the representation of the organization. Ironically, the illustrations revealed more than they hid: the charts implicitly evoked a layered organization, with its core parts visually fortifying an empty center and being surrounded first by a second band of organs (the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, and the Military Staff Committee) and a third outer band of even more remote yet affiliated specialized agencies. The language of periphery and center organized OSS’s visualizations of the new institution. The charts contoured dependencies and relationships, eventually introducing a globe as an external yet malleable object that the organization swung one way or another, transforming the UN into a pendulum and the Security Council into its fixed point (Figure 1.4, Plate 1).

The Dumbarton Oaks publication received rave reviews from the State Department, which welcomed the pamphlet for its ability to sketch out the organization for a wider audience, setting a somewhat fixed foundation for all negotiations to follow without, however, claiming to do so. The Secretary of State found the diagrams clear in explaining the structure and setting the visual language of this new international bureaucracy, while the Conference Secretariat ordered enlarged charts for San Francisco. Excited State Department officials saw potential for the department’s own publicity needs. An enthusiastic Dorothy Fosdick, a foreign policy expert and one of the few female employees at the State Department, requested the production of similar charts for promotional purposes targeting the U.S. public.27 The charts’ mass circulation would help cultivate an internationalist sentiment among the U.S. audience, serving a purpose beyond the conference.

But charts also allowed the Presentation Branch to present the conference as a well-oiled, efficient, and frictionless operation, leaving no doubt about the legitimacy of the enterprise. In a twenty-minute motion picture, Lundquist combined those flow charts to imply the engineering nature of the new organization and to interpellate the globe as its zone of operation.28 The press praised the Presentation Branch as a central agent to the flow of diplomatic work, attributing the smooth operations of committees to their designs and charts.29

Stettinius asked the Presentation Branch to produce visual aids for the various San Francisco committee meetings (Figures 1.5 and 1.6).30 During the couple of months that the San Francisco Conference lasted, commissions of delegates would discuss the structure, procedure and policies of each United Nations organ. Commission I addressed general procedures; Commission II the General Assembly structure; Commission III the Security Council; and Commission IV the judicial organization.31 Stettinius hoped that the charts would direct diplomatic discussions and structure meetings the same way that they guided military strategy.32 But diplomatic conversations did not need visuals to establish their conclusion. In fact, State Department officials advised against their use inside meetings, wary that their presentation as faits accomplis would result in their contestation. To the disappointment of the Presentation Branch personnel who longed to see their work put to the service of peace, State Department officials argued that illustrations did not leave enough “elbow room” for negotiations.33 Unlike war operations, diplomatic labor thrived in abstraction, turning OSS visualization techniques into an obstacle rather than a tool.

OSS designers also determined the symbols of the new organization, particularly its emblem. For example, proposals for a United Nations flag began arriving in 1943, as early as plans for a new organization started circulating in the press. Boris Artzybasheff’s rainbow flag, and even more so Brooks Harding’s “Four Freedoms” flag proposal, stirred up conversations on symbols for the new organization.34 As Biddiscombe shows, however, it was the lapel admission pin for delegates and visitors that would eventually win the UN seal of approval for the organization’s emblem. Donal McLaughlin, who led the team of designers responsible for the pin, found the initial proposals ambiguous and at times inappropriate: a chain around a globe to link all nations connoted slavery and imprisonment; the corner of a brick-and-mortar wall with an olive branch behind pointed to the “building” of peace but also its containment; a bundle of rods with olive branches to symbolize unity was too close to fascist iconography; and the initials “UN” would be illegible (Figure 1.7). He approved instead of an azimuthal projection of the globe for its ability to present all landmasses at once, surrounded by a laurel wreath as a symbol of peace.35 The Bastian Brothers manufactured the lapel pin with jewelers’ enamel in light blue hues (Plate 2).36 Larger versions of the insignia also appeared on the stage at the Veterans Building and later in the temporary venues that the UN inhabited before moving into the permanent Headquarters.

The San Francisco buildings served as the stages where the Presentation Branch would elaborate a new visual language for international bureaucracies, along with its symbols, textures, and color palettes. In hopes of further reinforcing a uniform appearance in front of delegates and mass media, Alger Hiss and Oliver Lundquist asked that all furniture be made out of high-end plywood and all floors be carpeted.37 Dazian’s Theatricals, a draping and costumes supplier for Broadway theaters, provided the drape for the stages in the blue-gray hue that came to be known as “Stettinius blue.”38 The stamp of the U.S. government was now everywhere, from the drapes to the pamphlets, and from the selection of the color tone to the linen-cotton blend for official documents.39

Regardless of all the rhetoric on uniformity, the San Francisco Conference stages revealed representational and design divergences. For the plenary hall, where the State Department anticipated sustained press interest during the opening, the closing remarks, and the main sessions, Hu Barton brought back theater designer Jo Mielziner,40 who had recently concluded a stint with the camouflage corps and OSS.41 His background in military projects, as well as his work on Broadway productions and stage design, qualified him for the job. Mielziner collaborated with Lou Voight and Lundquist, as well as theater lighting expert Ed Kook, to stage the plenary sessions for the press. The setting of the Veterans Building central hall, where the signing of the charter would take place, was taken over by Donal McLaughlin, with the help of State Department official Warren Kelchner, who had previously staged the Yalta conference on a circular table at the center of the room. The two approaches would ultimately result in two different directions for the architecture of international institutions.

On the one hand, Mielziner built on a long history of governmental architecture. To juxtapose the fragile and volatile moment that the end of World War II presented, Mielziner appropriated a more or less classical language to convey—and in this sense also to endow the new global institution with—power and authority.42 Initial sketches showed four freestanding golden pylons rising to the sky uncapped, implying an untapped potential for growth, with flagpoles plumed on their sides and garlands connecting their tops (Figure 1.8). The structure intertwined Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” with the UN’s framing device, metonymically conflating the United Nations with an American liberal understanding of freedom and democracy.43 Mielziner covered everything in cotton velour: the podium, the rostrum, the pylons, the stage floor, the desks’ aprons, and stair risers and treads, creating a shared color and texture palette for the UN commissions and meetings.44 The setting foregrounded the pylons and presented the emerging international institution as the anchoring site for national identities, securing the distinct and equal place of each participating nation within the UN’s structure.

Mielziner’s initial plan to affix flagpoles to the freestanding pylons met resistance both on technical grounds (the hollowed pylons could easily tip over, endangering the very representation of stability and security the organization wished to broadcast) and on symbolic grounds (the structure implied a dependency on the United Nations that was neither desirable nor truthful). Instead, the team placed the national flags in front of the signature gray-blue drape behind the podium, producing internationalism as the horizon and the nation-state as its elemental unit (Figure 1.9).45

The rest of the plan defined diplomatic protocol and process. In this sense the space did not diverge from years of plenary hall design, not even in how elevated podiums and secretarial pits demarcated hierarchies of work. Conference protocol officer Gerald A. Drew asked for a speaker podium just below and in front of an elevated “long table” for the President, Secretary-General, and other Secretariat officials leading the plenary sessions. He also placed verbatim reporters and typists in a sunken pit before the stage, hiding the infrastructure that supported the proceedings for an unobstructed view of the podium.

The theatrical element in Mielziner’s and Lundquist’s design, however, was more covert. Theater, for Mielziner, was not a spatial affair, but rather a relational possibility. It materialized wherever somebody was watching something happening, wherever there was an audience and a performance at play.46 His career had marked a departure from strict realism and an effort to “break the rigid, restricting straight line of the aprons of . . . twentieth-century theatres,” extending theatrical events to the audience and establishing theater as an active act of secularization.47 Although at a first glance the stage he created appears a far cry from his theories, heavy on symbolism and iconolatric representations of unity and peace, on a second read it reveals a complicated spectatorship architecture. For Mielziner and Lundquist, the convening delegates were not the audience but rather part of the spectacle that filming crews and photographers on the galleries would present to international publics around the world. The stage did not end with the secretarial pit and the presentation of the conference mechanism; instead, it extended to include the auditorium and its global polity that gathered to legitimize the UN’s becoming.48 Delegates and plenary hall speakers were equally participating in the performance for an audience residing outside the Opera House.

On the other hand, the modernist language of the central hall at the Veterans Building contradicted Mielziner’s neoclassical setting, repurposing military presentation technique—and its corporate ancestors—to imagine the representation of globality and the production of global space. McLaughlin, who was designing the stage for the Veterans Building, equally marshaled symbols, but in the place of neoclassicism, he offered abstraction and a new focus on function and procedure. He organized the plan as a “flow chart” similar to the ones OSS had been producing for the military.49 The plan delineated the circulation of national delegations inside and outside the building, demonstrating how they would arrive at the Veterans Building; be chaperoned to the briefing room; and then be escorted outside. The plan-as-flow-chart successfully transformed the space of global presentation into a matter of organizational engineering, producing the signing of the charter as a frictionless move through space (Figure 1.10).50 In this sense, McLaughlin designed the UN’s global platform as a management and organizational structure that eliminated friction and static.

If at the Opera House Plenary Hall architects staged the global polity as audience, at the Veterans Building Central Hall they presented the new organization’s public sphere through the synecdoche of the round table. In fact, for the signing of the UN Charter, the OSS placed the press near the entrance, with filming crews on the balcony above and journalists behind a rope on the floor. Building on the tables that the State Department had used to stage the preliminary international meetings, the Presentation Branch introduced a grand circular table on top of a thirty-six-foot diameter carpet that commanded the entire room and announced in front of press and cameramen, perhaps prematurely, the arrival of new, democratic cultures of assembly and diplomacy. The circular table framed a row of flags flanking the UN insignia mounted on another gray-blue drape behind the balustrade.51 Designed by Donal McLaughlin, the table at the center featured a small recess to indicate the place of the signatory. Although alluding to a round table, the desk was not functional, but rather symbolic. To sign the UN charter, the fifty national representatives took their seats at the table only one at a time, claiming the place of each member state in the new world order and committing their countries to the organization.

Not all elements of the set, however, spoke to the OSS’s modernist desires. Bearing semantic weight, the signer’s chair had McLaughlin, Lundquist, and the Presentation Branch scouring San Francisco for the appropriate piece. The curator of the de Young Museum proposed the big black-oak chair of federalist U.S. statesman Daniel Webster, a chair that the Presentation Branch loathed, calling it on record “a monument of ugliness.” Despite some fleeting sentiment for a more modern design, the team settled for the Webster chair but asked it to be reupholstered to match the rest of the interior.52 The OSS team also nixed an initial proposal to use an additional row of gilded upholstered chairs in the background; the chairs seemed incongruous with the rest of the design,53 in addition to “clutter[ing] up the action” and clashing with McLaughlin’s modernist aesthetic (Plate 3).54 The symbolism of the round table was more important than the rather literal translation of diplomats taking a seat at the table.

On June 26, 1945, on the ground floor of the Veterans Building in San Francisco, representatives from fifty nations concluded their month of debates and conversation with a ceremonial signing of the UN charter. Signatories received an additional minute for newsreel addresses and photographs to mark the signing. Writing from the Veterans Building, Donal McLaughlin talked about “an atmosphere of dazzling splendor.”55 Newspapers did not fail to notice the staging of the signing ceremony, remarking that the presence of cameramen, photographers, and journalists, as well as bright lights, induced a “Hollywood” atmosphere.56 Reporting from San Francisco, Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror described how the State Department transformed San Francisco into a stage, offering a full account of the Hollywood celebrities and studios involved in the affair. “This is not a Hollywood production, or San Francisco’s either, but the world’s and, especially, the State Department’s,” he said.57 In this sense the San Francisco Conference also affixed certain symbols, typography, and visual syntax to the UN, turning the lapel pin into the official emblem and the round table into a metonymy for the organization’s global public sphere. But in a more substantial way, the San Francisco Conference transformed those sites into stages, an important first step in the creation of the UN’s “global interiors.”

Landscapes of Justice

In early May 1945, and as Lundquist and his team were in the middle of the San Francisco Conference, President Truman summoned OSS to help with the preparation of another project to take place later that fall, the International Military Tribunal.58 The USSR’s initial desire for a swift extradition and the British government’s insistence on “summary execution” of World War II criminals had given way, and the four governments of the Allied powers—the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union—were convinced that an international trial was the necessary prelude to the launch of the UN. At the London International Conference on Military Trials national representatives from the four powers negotiated a legal process, building on the framework that the United Nations War Crimes Commission had been developing during World War II.59 The idea was to make the prosecution of “ruthlessness and unlawful force” in war public with an international tribunal. This way, the U.S. State Department argued, “world opinion” would regard the Allied powers as carriers of morality and the liberal cause of the emerging new organization as the only way forward.60 By August 1945, the four governments had agreed on an international military tribunal to be held in Germany and signed off on the prosecution of major war criminals, modeling international justice and announcing the UN’s commitment on human rights on an international stage.61

The desire for a public prosecution marked the preparations for the International Military Tribunal. OSS’s Bill Donovan convinced the skeptical U.S. Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson to admit mass media inside the courtroom so as to afford the tribunal a global audience.62 Admitting mass media meant, however, increased demands on office space and facilities, which complicated the search for a site. Justice Jackson relayed the apprehension of General Lucius D. Clay, who as a deputy military governor in Germany had been searching for possible locations:

We shall have very great difficulties about physical arrangements for a trial of this kind. . . . The destruction is so complete that there is hardly a courtroom standing in Germany. We have got to have a place for prisoners. We have got to have a place for witnesses. There are many people who will want to attend—military men from all parts. We have communications to set up. The press are [sic] going to want to know about this. The public is interested. There will be at least 200 correspondents for newspapers according to our estimates who will insist on having some place to live and a place to work. That estimate includes a representation of the presses of the different countries. You will have representatives of other nations who will want to observe us.63

The built reality complicated matters. Dilapidated building stock, the ruinous state of German urban centers, and a desire for a swift trial left the Allies with very few options to house a function with ever-increasing spatial needs for offices, storage, and accommodation.

Among the cities proposed, Nuremberg, suggested by General Clay, seemed to fit the bill.64 Although devastated by the British earlier that January, the city featured a relatively intact juridical complex on the outskirts of the city close to Fürth, the Justizpalast, with ample office space, courtrooms, and a four-wing panopticon prison adjacent to its rear for the defendants awaiting trial (Figure 1.11).65 Bringing the tribunals to Nuremberg also served an illustrative function, marking the end of war with the application of reason at the “symbolic capital” of Hitler’s Germany.66 Hitler perceived Nuremberg as the built expression of German culture and national identity, relocating his Party Rallies there from Munich.67 Between 1933 and 1938, the Nuremberg Reichsparteitagsgelände (the Reich Party Conference grounds) that Albert Speer planned for him became the epicenter of Hitler’s nationalist delirium.68

National governments had already utilized courtrooms as sites of political restoration, publicly prosecuting Nazi collaborators both on the local and the global scale. Attending the trial of Je suis partout editor-in-chief and Vichy-regime supporter Robert Brasillach in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir argued that courtrooms entangled and triangulated the public in an architecture of repair. “It is in our name that they judge, that they punish,” she claimed. “Ours is the public opinion that expresses itself through newspapers, posters, meetings, the public opinion that these specialized instruments are designed to satisfy.” She contended that the restitution of victimized publics in response to “tyranny” necessitated the prosecution of crimes and the administration of justice to “reestablish the dignity of man.”69 Unlike other forms of retribution, courtrooms offered the public a sustained view of the longue durée of modern punishment, watching war criminals, once perceived as heinous tyrannical figures, slowly but steadily being reduced within a highly ritualized environment into “tired,” “pitiful old” men.70 De Beauvoir called this an architecture of revenge aimed at reinstating the victims of the Nazi atrocities as subjects with agency. Primo Levi, who declared himself disinterested in revenge, called these trials a settling of accounts, “the hour of colloquy,” noting in retrospect that the military trials left him “intimately satisfied by the symbolic, incomplete, tendentious, sacred representation.”71 And this architecture of public retribution was necessary for the restitution of a liberal world order.

By hosting the trials in Nuremberg, the prosecution brought before the bench not only the criminal organization of the Third Reich, but also the cultures of spectacle and nationalist narratives of racial purity that nourished it, as well as the homogeneous vast publics it articulated through pictorial and film propaganda. This way the Allied powers would set the new public spaces of the UN world order against the vast centripetal spaces, spectacular celebrations, and military aesthetics of the Third Reich. This aesthetics would counter-propose, even if as a representation, a culture of democracy, transparency, and rationality to the totalitarian, conspiratorial, and spectacular logic that the Nazis had inhabited, while reifying international law as the agent and carrier of this new culture and practice of justice and diplomacy.

It is interesting then to note that the planning of the courtroom started in the absence of a building, as a floating interior. The memorandum that circulated among the U.S. Chief of Counsel’s staff on May 17, 1945, invited interested governmental agencies and their teams to contemplate their possible contribution to the prosecution planning, particularly in relation to the production of evidence—pictorial, filmic, and textual—and the architecture of the courtroom.72 This was also the first time that film was admitted as evidence in the courtroom.73 Rather than focusing on the judges and the triangulation of power, the new courtroom would need to tend to the presentation of the evidence gathered.74 This reconstitution of the courtroom around forensics, rather than the judges, speaks to what Jennifer Moonkin calls an emerging “culture of construction,” which endowed media with evidentiary value.75 The architecture of the courtroom was to participate in this production of evidence, but also in its global dissemination.

For the design of the Nuremberg courtroom, General Donovan asked the Presentation Branch to foreground visual evidence. Unlike military presentation rooms, where media produced a quantitative image of the world for a handful of strategists to analyze and interpret, the tribunal aimed to extract forensic value from visualization techniques for the entire world to watch, sealing World War II with a judicial victory over the Nazi party. In this sense the OSS presentation practices, but also architectures developed for presentation, aspired to be what Alejandra Azuero-Quijano defines as a “forensic practice” central in “demonstrating the rational, organized, and large-scale nature of Nazi war crimes as juridical evidence.”76 In other words, what for the military meant intelligence, information, and communication, in the hands of the tribunal would become evidence and facts for examination and cross-examination.

To spearhead the OSS team of designers for the military tribunal, Hu Barton appointed Dan Kiley, a young landscape architect with a small office in Washington, D.C.77 Kiley had just joined OSS on the recommendation of Eero Saarinen, with whom he had been developing military housing in Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Michigan.78 During his years at Harvard, Kiley had come to appreciate the Bauhaus tenets and functionalist principles behind Walter Gropius’s teachings and writings.79 Building on a multiscalar approach to design, Kiley proposed an integration of landscape and architecture. Along with fellow landscape designers Garrett Eckbo and James C. Rose, he declared that interior design and landscape should be in dialogue as “interchangeable and indistinguishable”:80

Landscape design is going through the same reconstruction in ideology and method that has changed every other form of planning since the industrial revolution. . . . The approach has shifted, as in building, from the grand manner of axes and facades to specific needs and specific forms to express those needs. . . . The technics are more complicated than in the Beaux Arts patterns, but we thereby achieve volumes of organized space in which people live and place, rather than stand and look.81

Kiley, who had visited the Pétain trials in Paris—a “really disorganized trial,” in his view—realized the need for an ordered courtroom that organized the legal landscape around the scope of the beholder—in the case of the Nuremberg Trials, the press. Dan Kiley’s team joined James (Jim) Johnson, a young architect who would draft plans and oversee the construction first in London and later in Germany, under the supervision of the Chief of Counsel.82

Building on the San Francisco experience, Kiley produced the courtroom as a “world stage” in his team’s preliminary plans for the Chief of Counsel. “I thought it was going to be a world spectacle,” Kiley recalled; “it wasn’t just an ordinary trial.”83 Kiley considered how the cameras and publics of the courtroom would follow the tribunal, without, however, bringing the same kind of attention to the placement of the judicial landscape. While advocating for the Nuremberg Opera House as an alternative to the Palace of Justice site, Kiley carefully placed reproduction and photographic facilities, radio, and press, but without further defining the space of the courtroom (Figure 1.12). In another equally diagrammatic sketch, he imagined a “[b]ackdrop depicting strength of the United Nations interwoven with ultimate justice prevailing over ‘might’ n ‘Force’,” speaking to the desire to present, along with evidence, the victory of institutional organization and reasoning over aggression and war (Figure 1.13).84 These initial plans rarely delineated the place of the judges’ benches, or the witness stand, or the defendants’ dock. There would be another architecture, another typology, to further determine the landscape of justice and its configuration of power presented to the world.

The architecture of courtrooms, in many ways, is an architecture of power and signification, where physical and visual forms structure jurisprudence as much as aesthetics.85 Room acoustics, judicial dress, lighting, and the architectural construction of relations among defendants, plaintiff, and publics inside the courtroom matter.86 Piyel Haldar calls the courtroom the parergon of law, the subsidiary (but no less necessary) apparatus that makes place for “legal judgment,” defining the “topography” of law while constituting both its “internal, ritualized domain” and its “outside” jurisdiction.87 And indeed, this topography of law, particularly within the context of European and North American courtrooms, as Linda Mulcahy and Katherine Fischer Taylor show, uses architecture to determine the relationships of power between the state and the public.88 Changing legal systems often result in the reorganization of the courtroom, particularly when there is a need to demarcate a new authority in space.89 Within these discussions the courtroom acts as a theater, either due to its performative character or due to its procedural nature and oral constitution.

In this sense, the Nuremberg trials courtroom also constituted a theatrical space designed for a dramatized experience of justice.90 However, conceptions of what qualified as spectacle varied. The Nuremberg Trials prosecution teams resisted attempts at spectacular constructions of the space, while the press often found those attempts falling flat for not producing dramatic enough effects. Additionally, Nuremberg was not a court but rather a tribunal. Tribunals, as Cornelia Vismann demonstrates, mark a transitional period between different juridical domains. They are temporary spaces of adjudication that do not adhere to one established legal system. In architectural terms this means that tribunals, even when they invite the public eye, are not courts-as-theaters with well-established positions for the stage and the auditorium, the actors and the spectators. In tribunals, the goal is to deliver a new power structure, displacing old authorities, in front of an audience that ultimately authorizes the court’s predetermined adjudication.91 As such, Courtroom 600 was primarily an ocular apparatus, a tool for seeing international law—and by extension world order—at work. It instructed a global polity on matters of international law while constituting the tribunal’s authority.

OSS architects had been working on such an ocular apparatus, while designing situation rooms for the military, long before Kiley inherited the design of the courtroom. Jean-Louis Cohen, building on Katz’s foregrounding of presentation technique, notes that Kiley’s designs acted as “a kind of retrospective situation room,” delivering a juridical “mise-en-scène.”92 Situation and war rooms constituted the main architectural contribution of the OSS Presentation Branch to the War Department.93 In fact, the Presentation Branch formed out of efforts to furnish initially President Roosevelt and later the War Department with an “architectural flexible presentation building” that would endow think tanks with a “panorama of concentrated strategic information.”94 From 1941 to 1944, Henry Dreyfuss and Eero Saarinen had proposed and refurbished presentation rooms for the American Ammunition Plant, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, OSS, G-2, the Deputy Chief of Staff, and the Bureau of Public Relations.95 These interiors combined the modern American corporate conference room and the map room central to war operations to create an operative and quantitative image of the world for the military to act upon, setting the government and the various theaters of operation in feedback loops.96 In the Joint Chiefs of Staff room—the most publicized situation room the OSS refurbished—maps and visualization boards took center stage, helping the strategists to see, assess, and plan war operations.97 OSS designers, and in that sense the State Department as well, understood the value of those situation rooms for the production of intelligence and biopolitical operations beyond war—particularly as a quantitative, market-driven logic was taking over policy and administration—assigning Saarinen with the task to further develop a presentation room for the State Department (Figure 1.14). This was the ocular architecture that the OSS architects aimed to deploy in Nuremberg.

The first proposal the Presentation Branch submitted to the Chief of Counsel in mid-July resembled those war rooms, introducing the logic of military situation rooms into sites of justice. An “exhibition wall” foregrounded “evidence” for cameras on the opposite site, while retaining the centrality of the judges in the reconfiguration of power (Figure 1.15). In his letter to Justice Jackson, Gordon Dean (soon to chair the United States Atomic Energy Commission) described that first proposal as “novel, if not intriguing,” not only for its exhibit wall, but also for bringing film crews inside the courtroom.98 The proposal responded to earlier directives asking for the containment of journalists and cameramen, while accommodating Bill Donovan’s request for unprecedented press access.99 Kiley would only have to install this situation room architecture on stage, centering the courtroom on charts and film, while reconfiguring the place of press, visualization easels, defendants, and judges.

The plan of the courtroom presented legal challenges, as well. There was the legislative problem: how to combine diverging national legal systems into a new foundation for international criminal law? There was, of course, the precedent of the Permanent Court of International Justice, but that organ had never aspired to attract the mass media in such a structural way. There was also the problem of representation: how to establish the international scope of the tribunal, not only in terms of its internal organization, but also in terms of its presumed jurisdiction, the world? The courtroom Dan Kiley had to design with the help of Jim Johnson did not have a single state as matron, but rather an international organization and the multilateral agreement that authorized the four judges on the bench to issue adjudications in the name of the United Nations. Representation was at best provisional.

Kiley declared the design of the courtroom a matter of economy and efficiency, not so much out of a desire to save time and money—although that was definitely a concern—but rather as a representation of new systems of reasoning.100 Figuration, decoration, and monumentality would undermine architectural representations of reason, especially given the scarcity of material and human infrastructure. Instead, Kiley arranged all parts in terms of a landscape, while “struggling to meet everybody’s requirements.”101 In early October, only a couple of months before the start of the trials, he submitted the final plan with provisions for furniture and media.102 Courtroom 600 on the second floor of the annex to the Nuremberg Justizpalast, where the trials would take place, featured a central, elevated judicial bench facing defendants and prosecution with a “well”—an empty resonant space between the bench and the plaintiff for testimonies to be weighed and judged—separating the judges (representatives of the state) from the public (the ultimate witness to the application of law) (Figure 1.16).103 Kiley kept the defendants’ dock in the same place, by the doorway connecting to the prison, and moved the judges onto an elevated bench on the opposite side, facing the defendants. In displacing the judges from the courtroom’s stage, a move that was strongly opposed by Colonel Robert J. Gill,104 Kiley subsumed the figure of the judge within the larger system of justice arranged in the courtroom.105

In the traditional place of the judge Kiley put the projection screen, the board, the witness stand, and the interpreters, and across from them he placed the lectern, in front of the prosecution and the press (Figure 1.17). He centered the courtroom on the system of evidence and testimony on the background. Facing the projection screen, and with his back to the press, the chief prosecutor would address the data, assembling them into undeniable proofs of the war crimes committed. Behind the chief prosecutor, the prosecuting teams gathering and structuring information into narratives would present a well-organized machine at work, a system to bring justice.106 This placement, as Mark Somos demonstrates, aligned the view of the press with the view of the prosecution, putting the public in the place of the prosecution interrogating evidence and defendants.107 Justice would not be a matter of subjective interpretation, but rather based on facts.

In other ways, Courtroom 600 was no different from any other courtroom in Germany. Each party participating in the trials would enter the landscape of justice from a separate entrance: the press from a side entrance directly connecting to the seating area; the court clerks and prosecutors from the main entrance; the defendants from the elevator that connected through an underground passage with the prison; the interpreters from a door behind their booths; and the judges from the doorway leading to their offices. Four staircases served the courtroom, sequestering all parties moving through the judicial complex. The rationalization of the circulation system introduced press, lawyers, judges, defendants, and interpreters as distinct parts of the trial, arriving at the site of justice via dedicated pathways that did not cross-contaminate. These circulation paths also implied that the system as a whole amounted to something bigger than its constitutive parts, and that international law afforded multilateralism an infrastructure of justice.

It was in this fusion of judges, public, and media that the Nuremberg Trials’ configuration of justice was produced. The international tribunal offered an opportunity to render “international law” visible to an exterior public, and at the same time to define how the public “would see it.”108 Courtroom 600 would instruct the values and structures of an international legal system in the making. “Unified, orderly, and dignified, that’s what the courtroom should be,” Kiley recalled later. There was the task of placing these different kinds of labor in space and delineating their relationships, generating a landscape of justice. There was the work of the defense counsels; the prosecution; the judges; the witnesses; the visual evidence; the interpreters; the clerks; the guards; and on a macroscale, the work of the press and that of internationalism, to be organized and presented in space. But there was also the additional semantic task of endowing the new international order with form and meaning, readily available to the journalists reporting back home and graspable in photographs, even if only to appeal to a collective subconscious. The U.S. State Department requested that the cases be “well reported to the world at large.”109 Apart from mediating this construction of a new justice system to the public outside, mass media would more importantly imply the presence of a mediated public in the courtroom.

To make space for the press, Dan Kiley demolished the rear wall of the courtroom, opening it up to the anteroom, and took down the wood paneling on the upper gallery to supply radio and camera booths with windows toward the courtroom (Figure 1.18).110 The U.S. Army Signal Corps set up radio broadcasting in the attic, while cameramen filmed footage for newsreels around the courtroom.111 The old media of the courtroom—its wooden paneling and figurative program—was covered with white walls to make space for the new media—radio and film (Figure 1.19).

More than a judicial landscape, the courtroom delivered what the Allies thought to be an important lesson in institutional multilateralism. Photographs providing glimpses into Courtroom 600 appeared in newspaper articles around the world. Often the photographs centered on the prisoners’ dock, where the Nazi leaders sat under the vigilant gaze of the guards, and even more frequently the courtroom was erased altogether in favor of close-up portraits that attempted to attenuate the notoriety of those figures. But photobooks—books that used photographs to tell the story of the trials for a bigger audience—gave a slightly different account, presenting the courtroom as the instrument through which the Allied forces delivered retributive justice in the name of a global polity and liberal values.112 During the trials the U.S. Army Signal Corps filmed the proceedings—although intermittently—for legal but also commercial reasons. Using some of that footage, Stuart Schulberg directed Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948), which reached movie theaters in Europe and the United States, and Elizaveta Svilova directed the USSR production Суд народов (released in English as The Nuremberg Trials, 1947), further reifying the image of international law and the global space of its annunciation.113 But most importantly, Courtroom 600 fixed in place a mass media apparatus as constitutional to global interiors, challenging architects to further elaborate on the emerging new typology of public spaces while planning for the United Nations sites.

The Soundscape of Internationalism

But visual communication was not the only matter of concern. Although not immediately apparent, voice commanded the landscapes of media that OSS architects, broadcast networks, and engineers brought together in those preliminary spaces of global governance. The voice projecting from the podium constituted their political function, engulfing the polity it was addressing while feeding microphones and recording systems with signals to be transmitted, broadcast, stored, and archived as part of the organization’s institutional memory. The voice was also the signal to circulate the world, turning those global interiors into its broadcasting instruments. All this attention and care around the spoken word also revealed its entanglement with the production of this new global public sphere. The acoustic formation of public spheres was apparent to the organizers of the San Francisco Conference, as it has been evident to anyone planning public speaking events. The desire to hear and be heard marks any attempt to articulate a public, even if as metaphor.

Acoustics were also important for the Nuremberg Trials. Voice and auditory technique hold a central place inside courtrooms—the spaces of elocution and testimony, as James E. Parker points out.114 The acoustic nature of trials structures legal procedure and its temporality. Mladen Dolar argues that the “living voice” becomes the main medium through which the public gets to know and practice law, the main “instrument by which the legal system could be extracted from the hands of specialists” and brought into the public.115 The voice of the judge implements the written law, with testimonies, examinations, cross-examinations, and closing remarks ordering the “judicial soundscape.” Access to the courtroom depends on access to its soundscape, to be able to listen to the testimonies, but also to testify. To submit to the authority of the court a witness takes an oath, committing orally to speaking the truth. Visual evidence and testimonies, words and objects, intertwine in a complex audiovisual landscape, which judges (and sometimes juries as well) scan for their adjudication.116 For a courtroom to work all parties need to be able to listen to but also to be heard by all.

What distinguished the soundscapes of San Francisco and Nuremberg from other courtrooms and parliaments was the problem of language. National juridical and political processes operate under the postulate of a shared and common language that orders the acoustic space. The San Francisco Conference and the Nuremberg Trials constituted, however, fundamentally multilingual spaces, where translation was necessary for equitable and broad access to the publics of the world. To solve this problem, the organizing committee in San Francisco turned to the diplomatic tradition of interpretation. Historically, interpreters had occupied public positions next to diplomats and politicians.117 Diplomats’ accounts presented interpreters as almost mythic machines, marveling in their capacity to memorize and translate on the spot. Stories recalled Paul Mantoux, Georges Clemenceau’s interpreter at the Paris Peace Conference, and his “uncanny” ability to recite by heart very long addresses.118 Interpreters themselves perpetuated this mythology. Arthur Birse, Churchill’s interpreter, described his peers as “mouthpieces” with extraordinary capacities for focus and attention.119 League of Nations and later United Nations interpreter Jean Herbert reveled in his own capacity to interpret even while falling asleep.120 The metaphor of the machine served the interpreters well, particularly since it rendered them transparent mediums of transmission lacking subjective agency, as Laura Kunreuther argues.121 But presenting themselves as machines also forged the path for their removal from the public eye and their integration into a mechanical sound system of speech transmission to structure any public space with internationalist aspirations.

Although French and English were the two official languages that diplomats adopted in San Francisco, the delegates were invited to use any language of their choice as long as they provided their own interpreters, who would take the podium and translate their speech immediately thereafter, a method known as consecutive interpretation.122 A hallmark of bilateral diplomacy, consecutive interpretation had prevailed in international conferences and organizations in the early twentieth century. However, it was not without its own shortcomings. To begin with, consecutive interpretation substantially prolonged proceedings, doubling their duration. Time lags between a speech and its translated delivery—utterance and comprehension—disrupted the procedural flow. Delegates frequently used this additional time to prepare their own speeches or socialize backstage, disengaging and removing themselves from the process.

If for the relatively compact San Francisco Conference consecutive interpretation did not significantly affect attendance, for the Nuremberg Trials, which planned to bring on the witness stand twenty-two Nazi leaders and over a hundred witnesses for examination and cross-examination in four languages—let alone the trials of lower-ranking Nazi doctors and officers from 1946 to 1949—consecutive interpretation would double the duration of the trials, imperiling the swift delivery of adjudication. The success or failure of the process depended on an effective interpretation system. The other solution—to establish a lingua franca, so to speak—required diplomatic negotiations and threatened the fragile multilateral agreements that authorized the tribunal. A robust and effective interpretation system would short-circuit this crisis of diplomatic negotiation by eluding the establishment of a main language of communication, hence endowing the court with the appearance of equal power.

The only alternative to the consecutive interpretation method was an archaic model of simultaneous interpretation at the time installed by the International Business Machines company (IBM)—but not in use—at the League of Nations. The Filene-Finlay system of “telephonic interpretation,” as the system was originally named, consisted of headphones, dials, interpreters, and a control room that monitored sound volume and channel distribution. Behind the speaker rostrum, interpreters translated each speech into one of the official languages; on the other end, each delegate, equipped with a headset and a dial, tuned in to the channel with the language of their choice. Interpretations did not interrupt the proceedings, but rather happened more or less simultaneously.

This system had been developed with the financial support of New England businessman Edward Filene, who noted at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and the International Chamber of Commerce founding meetings that consecutive interpretation was disruptive and dragged out the meetings. These disruptions were an unwelcome reminder that capitalism was not an organic frictionless force that moves steadily forward, regardless of the hopes of industrialists and businessmen. Looking at telephones, at the time seen as media of untapped broadcasting potential, Filene reached out to League of Nations Secretary-General Eric Drummond in 1924 with an idea for a telephonic system. Given that most of the delegates prepared their speeches in writing, this telephonic method would allow the interpreters to deliver their translations almost instantly and relatively accurately. He hired British engineer Alan Gordon-Finlay, who was working for the International Labor Organization (ILO), and together they wired delegates to interpreters with “hush-a-phones,” a cup-like attachment for telephones that insulated voices from background noise (Figure 1.20).123 The goal was to produce communication as organic, instantaneous, and automated, eliminating any suspicion of friction, political or otherwise.

Since its installation at the Palais des Nations, however, the Filene-Finlay System had been in disuse, a disuse that reflected the suspicion with which international institutions had received it.124 Perceiving it to be a threat to their profession, interpreters had abstained from working on it, actively sabotaging its use. League diplomats hesitated to adopt a system that had not been tested before. They also wondered how one could speak and listen to another speaker at the same time. The new system required that delegates stand still and speak slowly in front of microphones, challenging early twentieth-century styles of oration and public speaking. But there was also an impending question of control. The simultaneous interpretation system placed complete control with the interpreter, denying diplomats the opportunity to correct or revise the interpretation of their speech. Half of the delegates proclaimed the solution ingenious and half of them useless, leading to its abandonment. One small victory for IBM was that the League of Nations founded a School of Interpretation at the University of Geneva to train interpreters for its translation system, which later equipped the Nuremberg Trials and the United Nations with interpreters.125 Perhaps the largest problem was that—because consecutive interpretation continued while the Filene-Finlay system was in use—League diplomats never realized the timesaving benefits that the system was designed to deliver.126 Instead, the predominant consecutive model created the acoustic inferno that British journalist George Slocombe described as a “babel of strange sounds.”127

During the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, OSS officials suggested the “telephonic” method to avoid the “dull,” “inefficient” consecutive interpretation and the “cold voices of the interpreters, which painfully slowed up the proceedings” of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference,128 but skepticism and inertia won the argument.129 Political leaders were reluctant to replace their own interpreters with what looked like a mechanical system. One of the issues for Dumbarton Oaks was trust. A set of interpreters translating out of view, with an additional engineer working the control room, undermined the sense of agency over one’s own words that the situation demanded. In addition, the number of delegates and politicians participating allowed for consecutive interpretation without testing the participants’ endurance. The 1945 San Francisco Conference presented yet another opportunity to implement the simultaneous interpretation system, but consecutive interpreters boycotted the attempt. There were not enough experienced simultaneous interpreters, and administrators preferred the safety of the known over the unknown system, especially in such a public and outward-looking event. Instead, the conference administrators designated two official languages, bringing past diplomatic traditions into the post–World War II world order.

The importance of a timely deliberation at the Nuremberg trials, however, forced administrators to adopt the telephonic interpretation system over recurring obstacles and people’s suspicions. Ultimately, the signal architecture of the telephonic system facilitated the broadcast of the proceedings to a wider audience, rendering the tribunals a global event. For the Nuremberg trials, the prosecutors hired IBM to design and build the simultaneous interpretation system they would use. Telephonic wires and switch selectors tied together judges, witnesses, examiners, and interpreters in communication channels that fed the entire courtroom with instantaneous translations in four languages: French, Russian, German, and English. Radio broadcasters would pick up interpreted recordings to use in their programs. The main channel was also projected in the room with loudspeakers that proved entirely ornamental, given that everyone dialed into the system rather than listened to the deliberations. Efficiency was not the only reason that prosecutors agreed on the telephonic system. By using simultaneous interpretation, the prosecution teams eliminated the additional time available for the preparation of the defense.

But the placement of the telephonic interpretation system presented an architectural challenge. The first two iterations of the system had kept interpreters in the public eye, close to the speaker’s podium, but the final installation at the Palais des Nations had removed interpreters from the debate floor, arranging them behind walls to create the fantasy of organic and frictionless international communications.130 Microphones picked up words; cables transmitted signals to a “concealed translating center”; headphones “relayed [each speech] to the auditorium,” but interpreters—doing the actual labor of translation—were nowhere to be seen. IBM had celebrated this architectural construction of invisible labor as a technological miracle. “The barrier of confused tongues . . . has been overcome,” the press release claimed. “A speaker may now have the unique experience of having his thoughts immediately understood by an audience composed of people who do not understand the language in which he is addressing them” (Figure 1.21).131 But interpreters, who perceived their removal from the public eye as an offense to their professional dignity, loathed it.

Kiley’s architectural solution was telling of the special place interpretation held as an internationalist technology. Unlike IBM, Kiley moved the interpreters back to the spotlight, behind glass, on a raised platform next to the witness stand. Since interpreters had long been imagined as machines, with a “full command” of languages, “unusual memory,” and an “exceptional faculty of concentration,” Kiley decided to present them as pivotal parts of the technocracy that organized the tribunals (Figure 1.22). The placement was not functional, but rather representational. In making the presence of interpretation conspicuous and unambiguous for both journalists and the world community following the trials, Kiley constructed international law as the system ordering the “Babel of tongues,” while leaving little doubt as to how the system of international justice worked and who ordered it. He also reinforced the global and transparent character of the trials, articulating in space international law as efficient, fact-driven, and global. In doing so, Dan Kiley produced a judicial modern picturesque, in the sense that the image of international justice that the prosecution and the UN wanted to present to the world drove the design of the courtroom.

But in critically reducing the length of the trials, the IBM system also transformed the very structure of the juridical public. The interpretation apparatus required the use of headphones, but headphones acoustically isolated participants.132 In this sense a global polity could exist only as an aggregation of individuals with atomized experiences of and relations to the legal system. Headphones, as Jonathan Sterne notes, produce an experience of listening alone-together, especially in public spaces.133 Unlike previous courtrooms and their shared acoustic space, what participants experienced in Nuremberg was their acoustically “collectivized isolation.”134 The IBM system transformed the courtroom into a space of individuation, where all participants inhabit “their own private acoustic worlds,” and share the experience of their individuation.135 Everybody inside the courtroom could participate, but only as individuals. No global public space—not for international trials, or international conferences, or assemblies—could exist outside the space where interpreters and headphones existed. Communication stopped the moment delegates stepped outside the room. Only within the room that interpretation systems organized did internationalism exist—not outside.

On November 21, 1945, Justice Robert H. Jackson took the podium. Across an empty witness stand and a presentation screen he inaugurated the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.” Journalists and photographers anticipated a highly dramatized effect. Stuart Schulberg describes how OSS’s Documentary Evidence Section proposed to line the docket with neon lights to illuminate the expressions of Nazi defendants as evidentiary film was screened. This lighting led journalists and reporters to perceive the trials as an encounter between the Nazi apparatus and its crimes. Joseph Kessel, describing it as a “unique moment in a lifetime,” commented on the restorative power of the “confrontation” between the film and the Nazis, between the illustration of the horrific acts and the agents of horror.136

Yet the staging of the trials did not have the dramatizing effect that graphic photographs and sensational headlines in the world press promised. Routine and boredom reigned in the courtroom, with testimonies dragging, legal terminology alienating journalists, and judicial etiquette tiring the public. The New Yorker’s Rebecca West described the courtroom as the “citadel of boredom,” poignantly remarking:

The nerves of all others present in the Palace of Justice are sending out a counter-prayer: the eight judges on the bench, who are plainly dragging the proceedings over the threshold of their consciousness by sheer force of will; the lawyers and the secretaries, who sit, sagging in their seats because they have been there so long, at the tables in the well of the court; the interpreters, twittering like sleepy birds in their glass boxes; the guards, who stand with their arms gripping their white truncheons behind their backs, as still as hard as metal, except for their childish faces, which are puffy with boredom. All want to leave Nuremberg as urgently as a dental patient enduring the drill wants to get up and leave the chair.137

The IBM system that was designed to shorten the duration of the trials had also slowed down the juridical process, forcing witnesses, defense, and prosecution to follow the pace of the interpreters. Yes, the interpreters could translate almost instantaneously, but to do so everyone else needed to adjust to a slower pace. Interpreters ordered the temporal reality and social life of the courtroom with “stop signs” and light bulbs on the podium, red signaling to stop and orange to slow down (Plate 4). In addition, the interpretation system forced all constituent parties to stay put in their posts behind microphones. Moving away from one’s microphone equaled losing access to the legal system and the right to participate. Lawyers could not improvise and interrupt the process, creating dramatic performances to lure the judges. Judges could not lean in and whisper to secretaries or their colleagues without being recorded or interpreted. They had to announce they wanted to be “off the record.”138 Hence, the IBM system disciplined all participating bodies, transforming the courtroom into a technocracy.

Following the Nuremberg Trials, the IBM system of simultaneous interpretation became an integral component for any event or space claiming an international character. Even Justice Jackson, who had doubted the success of the system, anticipating that the trials would be “a confusion of tongues” and “ridiculous,”139 enthusiastically endorsed simultaneous interpretation by the end of the tribunals.140 At the same time, General MacArthur was transplanting the spatial configuration of the Nuremberg trials to Japan for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. When the trials launched in Tokyo later that spring of 1946, the prosecutors used Dan Kiley’s diagram to organize the courtroom. The agonistic framing of the defendants against their judgment remained the same, but instead of a screen and interpreters the stage was taken over by dignitaries. Interpreters initially appeared in ad hoc places on the sides, but soon moved to a more formalized glass booth facing the press and the general public (Figure 1.23).141 Ralph Walker, who was at the time retrofitting the Sperry Gyroscope Plant at Lake Success, adopted Kiley’s glass interpretation stations but arranged them on the sides rather than the back of the hall (Figure 1.24). This initial configuration offered a productive opportunity to negotiate transparency and function, but noise complaints from interpreters forced Walker to enclose the interpretation stations later in 1946, effectively turning them into boxes (Figure 1.25). By the time that the UN Security Council moved to its temporary headquarters in Lake Success after a short stint at Hunter College, the place of the interpreters was affixed inside booths. The presentation of transparency was no longer constitutional to questions of security in the same way that it had been in the application of law. Later in 1947, when Flushing Meadows hosted the United Nations Assembly for the first time for a special session on the Palestinian occupation, UN bureaucrats fastened the place of interpreters inside booths, below the radio and film galleries flanking the plenary hall, making sure that the interpreters had visual access while remaining relatively invisible, hence enabling the fantasy of organic communication at a moment of diplomatic crisis (Figure 1.26).

From 1947 to 1953 requests for the IBM system rose from around nine to sixty per year.142 In 1954 the company boasted that the system had made possible almost “258 international meetings” in “120 cities” in “34 countries,” serviced by the “entire IBM family around the world.”143 The system would no longer be tied to buildings, chairs, and tables, but rather to the people using it, divorcing the acoustic space of international communication from the space it organized. Technicians would carry interpreters’ booths, switching selectors, headphones, and microphones from conferences to meetings, and from assembly halls to courtrooms. This divorce was instrumental in widening the horizons of where and how simultaneous interpretation could be used, making possible the imagination of its future installation in conference venues, museums, and tours (Figure 1.27). Kiley’s plan for Courtroom 600 transformed transparency into an integral value of the global interior, denoting the desire to reach and involve an international public residing outside the courtroom.144 In this sense, the simultaneous interpretation system changed the presentation of international institutions, placing an emphasis on physical interiors and turning them into the de facto site of institutional internationalism.

In the San Francisco Conference and the Nuremberg Trials, the United Nations called the new global structure into existence, but also determined that the engagement with the larger public would be structured via communications and mass media. The path for the UN’s representation of liberal internationalism was forged by the San Francisco Conference, where the Conference Committee, in order to qualify its platforms as international and global, had opened its doors, inviting the public (if only as eyes and ears) inside its plenary halls, the spaces that articulated the new global polity, its structures and its organs. After the conclusion of the conference, Stettinius asked Donovan to lend him Oliver Lundquist to create a UN division along the lines of the OSS Presentation Branch—the Department of Public Information, where Lundquist would serve as a “Special Services Officer” overseeing the production of films and establishing visual continuity between the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations and the United Nations.145 Following the warm reception of the delegates’ badge, David Zablodowsky, who also moved on to serve in the Department of Public Information, adapted and revised the lapel pin design to become the United Nations emblem that we know today.146

The American prosecution team used Courtroom 600 for twelve further military tribunals with a gloss of global authority and international affect. The French, Russian, and English prosecution teams withdrew from this second round of trials due to growing differences over jurisprudence and legal procedures. However, the power of Kiley’s courtroom to signify and represent international order had superseded the need for a multilateral agreement to authorize these tribunals. The authority of the tribunals, in turn, established the plan of the courtroom. The Nuremberg courtroom laid the grounds not only for the immediate future (the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) but also for the post–1989 human rights project and the International Criminal Court, reified in its permanent seat in The Hague. There, architectural firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen implemented a historically global space, while actively internationalizing the spaces of law. “The most significant thing about Nuremberg is that it happened,” claimed Whitney Robson Harris, the U.S. attorney and prosecutor.147 He was not the only one. In fact, as legal historians and scholars have repeatedly argued, the prosecution of the Nazis was gratuitous in the first place. The significance of the event lay in its presentation of an operative system for international law, a new territory to be explored and navigated by international organizations, bureaucrats, and diplomats.

Inside those initial platforms, architecture produced two spaces: the lived space where new public spheres were formulated in the name of a global polity, and their representation through media. Between the two, the space as image and the space as practice, the separation was resolute and complete, allowing for institutional internationalism at large to acquire the image of a systemic, transparent, and just bureaucracy without lived experience undermining its efficiency and authoritative power. Above all, these initial configurations of public platforms placed an imaginary global polity inside the new institutions, while keeping publics-as-bodies outside. Those physical interiors, although global in their reach, were still impermeable as spaces, leaving mass media with the constitutive function of establishing connections with the larger world community.