A Workshop for Peace: Designing the United Nations Headquarters

Abstract

George Dudley is an architect and planner who was present and kept official notes of the 45 meetings of the international Board of Design for the United Nations. In this book he unfolds the first eyewitness account of the creation of a landmark building that was functionally and symbolically important in its time, marking the emergence of modern architecture as the dominant language of post-war institutions and cities. In tackling long-standing questions of authorship, Dudley reproduces pages from Le Corbusier's UN, sketchbook for that period, long thought to be irretrievably lost, and sheds new light on Le Corbusier's contribution to the design process. A Workshop for Peace is a record of a design process in which the principal players - Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sven Markelius, Wallace Harrison, Howard Robertson, Louis Skidmore, Julio Vilamajo, Ssu-Ch'eng Liang and Max Abramovitz - disagree with one another and collaborate in turns. The Board of Design took pains to present the design as the unanimous result achieved by this group, and agreed that no individual credit should be given to any one architect. But Le Corbusier began a campaign after he left New York to claim that the central idea for the UN's design was his alone. Dudley carefully analyzes the evolution of the design and compares the scheme to dated entries made in Le Corbusier's sketchbooks during the design process.