Assembly by Design
The United Nations and Its Global Interior
Published on 10. September 2024
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-1-5179-1332-8 (ISBN)
Description
How the United Nations headquarters became the architectural instrument and broadcast medium of global diplomacy
For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.
Assembly by Design shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances.
Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats-believing that assembly was a matter of design-worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.
For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.
Assembly by Design shows how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world. With its media infrastructure, symbols, acoustic design, and architecture, the global interior defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters, serving as the architectural medium to organize multilateral encounters of international publics around the globe. Demonstrating how aesthetics have long held sway over political work, Olga Touloumi posits that the building framed diplomacy on the ground amid a changing political landscape that brought the United States to the forefront of international politics, destabilizing old and establishing new geopolitical alliances.
Uncovering previously closed institutional and family archives, Assembly by Design offers new information about the political and aesthetic decisions that turned the UN headquarters into a communications organism. It looks back at a moment of hope, when politicians, architects, and diplomats-believing that assembly was a matter of design-worked together to deliver platforms for global democracy and governance.
Reviews / Votes
"How to put the world in one place? Olga Touloumi's rich case study, full of archival surprises and telling images, shows us some fascinatingly brilliant and tortured answers to that question. Despite rumors, space in an electronic age hasn't vanished, and its form matters profoundly. You'll never think about the public sphere, sound, or architecture in the same way again."-John Durham Peters, Yale University"Assembly by Design is an exacting examination of the ways in which the United Nations' participation in twentieth-century entanglements of nationalism and internationalism, colonialism and decolonization, have been profoundly shaped by the materials and ideologies of design. With a timely and revelatory analysis of the mediatic space of the UN that turns attention from the global village to the global interior, this book forcefully proves the consequentiality of design."-Timothy Hyde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Assembly by Design paints a detailed picture of how the UN staged, and later disseminated, the vision of liberal internationalism in the decades following the Second World War."-SITE
"Touloumi's book is immensely well researched and annotated, valuable as history and as a theoretical examination of the physical and metaphysical ideation of world governance."-Places Journal
"The sheer depth of Touloumi's archival wrangling and her synthesis of content across fields and languages in explaining the 20th century's (still standing) Tower of Babel is impressive."-Architectural Record
"For architecture, interior design, international relations, and cultural studies scholars and enthusiasts, Assembly by Design is an essential read. It provides an accessible but richly detailed historical account of the UN's headquarters and a compelling argument for considering how design, particularly interior design, shapes our collective experiences, both now and through their relationship with the past." -The Plan Journal
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
106 black and white photos and 13 color plates
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
680 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5179-1332-8 (9781517913328)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Olga Touloumi is associate professor of architectural history at Bard College. She is coeditor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground.
Content
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Global Interior
1. Staging the World
2. Cultures of Assembly
3. The Voice of the World
4. The Headquarters and the Field
Epilogue: Itinerant Platforms
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Global Interior
1. Staging the World
2. Cultures of Assembly
3. The Voice of the World
4. The Headquarters and the Field
Epilogue: Itinerant Platforms
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index