Art: Simple Geometry

Ten of the world’s top architects, including France’s Le Corbusier and Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer, had joined in deciding what the U.N. headquarters, on Manhattan’s East Side, should look like. When their tentative plan was first announced (TIME, June 2, 1947), it raised a storm of protest. Howled one architect: “It looks like a sandwich on edge and a couple of freight cars.”

Nonetheless, the plan for the most startling part of U.N.’s headquarters, the Secretariat, was completed. It had been supervised by Architect Wallace K. Harrison, who also helped design Rockefeller Center. Described this week in detail in the June issue of ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, it was bound to stir up a second storm: the final blueprints were even more strikingly “modern” than the original.

The Secretariat, a 39-story office skyscraper towering above the long low assembly building, looked more like an ice-cream sandwich. Its north and south walls were the ice cream—solid bands of marble. The east and west walls were corrugated expanses of blue-green glass. Each wall consisted of 2,700 windows held by a tracery of aluminum. Their effect, said the FORUM, would be that of “a mosaic reflecting the sky from a thousand facets.”

It would be a notably narrow skyscraper (72 ft. wide, 544 ft. high). “Greater total width would have been undesirable,” the FORUM explained, because so many of the prospective tenants were high brass who would require honorific outside offices. There was a similar diplomatic reason for the Secretariat’s 4,000 separate air-conditioning units. “Such a luxurious standard,” said the FORUM, “is enforced on U.N. by the contiguity of Icelanders and Abyssinians . . . each with his own idea of thermal comfort.”

The Secretariat alone would cost some $21 million to construct. For its money, U.N. would doubtless get an efficient workshop. Would the glass & marble shell also look monumental enough for the purpose? Argued the FORUM: “In Washington, a hundred years ago, monumentality was columns. On the East River, now, it is construed as serenely simple geometry, akin to the pyramids . . .”

The main purpose of the pyramids was to give lasting protection to Pharaohs’ mummies, but the slaves who built them must have seen the pyramids as foursquare symbols of tyranny at its solidest and heaviest. By contrast, the plans for Manhattan’s U.N. Secretariat called for lightness, elegance—and fragility. The Secretariat’s sky-filled, four-acre walls of windows, which might be shattered by a single bomb blast, would symbolize an optimism unknown to tyrants.