At the United Nations, Updating a Modernist Icon

United Nations General Assembly Hall. Image via Wikimedia Commons

At the tall iron gates of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, Marian Miszkiel, a Canadian engineer who has previously rebuilt bombed-out buildings in Kosovo, hands me a hard hat and leads me through security and toward the entrance of the General Assembly building. We haul open the heavy silver and nickel front doors, designed by the formidable Canadian modernist Ernest Cormier, into an airy lobby with balconies curved like massive white bones. Boomerang-shaped, the five-storey Assembly is a marvel of mid-century design, a mostly unsung hero of 1950s architecture conceived during that fragile postwar era by a prestigious board of design consultants nominated by member governments, including the legendary architects Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, the project’s chief architect, Wallace K. Harrison, and Cormier.

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