United Nations Headquarters - New York
United Nations Headquarters - New York
There are certain buildings that become so familiar that you almost stop looking at them.
The United Nations Headquarters in New York is one of those buildings.
Its long slab of blue glass beside the East River has appeared behind presidents, prime ministers, diplomats and television reporters for generations. The flags outside are instantly recognisable. Yet when you actually stand in front of the complex, there is something rather different about it.
It is surprisingly restrained.
For a building intended to represent almost the entire world, there is very little architectural showing off. Perhaps that is part of what makes it so interesting.
A New World After War
The story really begins in 1945.
Europe had been devastated by six years of war. Cities had been destroyed, millions were dead, and the world had witnessed destruction on a scale that was almost impossible to comprehend.
There was a determination, however optimistic it may now seem, that something had to change.
Representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco between April and June 1945 to draw up the United Nations Charter. The organisation formally came into existence on 24 October 1945.
It needed a permanent home.
New York was by no means the obvious choice. A number of locations were considered, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and sites elsewhere around New York and Connecticut.
The eventual site was certainly not glamorous.
It was an area of Manhattan beside the East River occupied by slaughterhouses, light industry, tenements and a railroad barge landing. It is difficult to imagine that when looking at the site today.
The decisive moment came when John D. Rockefeller Jr. provided $8.5 million to acquire the land for the United Nations. The General Assembly accepted the offer in December 1946.
The location of one of the world's most famous diplomatic buildings had been decided.
Designing Something That Had Never Existed Before
The architecture is probably the part of the story that interests me most.
Rather than simply handing the project to one celebrated architect, an international team was assembled under American architect Wallace Harrison.
It was an extraordinary group.
Le Corbusier represented France, Oscar Niemeyer came from Brazil, Sven Markelius from Sweden, Liang Seu-Cheng from China, Howard Robertson from Britain and others came from Canada, Belgium, Australia, Uruguay and the Soviet Union.
They met repeatedly in 1947, considering dozens of different proposals before arriving at the scheme that would eventually be built. The final forms owed particularly much to ideas developed by Le Corbusier and Niemeyer.
There is something rather fitting about that.
A headquarters intended for international cooperation was itself created through international cooperation.
Building the United Nations
Construction formally began on 24 October 1949 — exactly four years after the United Nations had come into existence.
The building that dominates everything is, of course, the Secretariat.
At 39 storeys high, it was unlike much of the New York surrounding it at the time. Instead of the heavy stone façades and elaborate setbacks associated with Manhattan skyscrapers, this was essentially a great rectangular sheet of glass and marble.
The Secretariat became the first major International Style building constructed in New York and one of the city's pioneering skyscrapers to use an all-glass curtain wall.
Looking at photographs from the early 1950s, you can understand how startling it must have appeared.
New York had plenty of taller and more decorative skyscrapers, but the UN looked as though it belonged to another age.
That was intentional.
This wasn't supposed to look backwards.
It was supposed to represent what came next.
Staff began moving into the Secretariat in 1951, while the headquarters complex was completed in 1952. The Dag Hammarskjöld Library was added later, in 1961.
Inside the Headquarters
Walking through the complex is where the United Nations becomes much more than the familiar glass tower seen from outside.
The General Assembly Hall is probably the room most people recognise.
It is enormous, but there is also something strangely intimate about it when empty.
Every member state has a place.
The sweeping desks face towards the green marble rostrum, and the huge golden United Nations emblem dominates the wall behind it.
This is the room we have seen countless times on television.
Speeches that made history have been delivered here. Arguments have taken place here. Condemnations, declarations, walkouts and occasionally moments of genuine international agreement have all happened beneath that emblem.
Elsewhere are the Security Council, Economic and Social Council and Trusteeship Council chambers.
The corridors are equally fascinating.
Artworks and gifts from nations around the world appear throughout the headquarters. Some are monumental, others surprisingly modest. Together they give parts of the building the feeling of a museum assembled by the world itself.
Then there are the flags outside.
Every morning the flags of the member states are raised along the front of the complex.
It is perhaps the simplest image at the United Nations but also one of its most effective.
Countries that may profoundly disagree with one another still stand alongside each other.
A Building With a Complicated Job
It is easy to be cynical about the United Nations.
Wars have continued. Genocides have happened. Governments ignore resolutions. The Security Council can become paralysed by disagreement between its permanent members.
The organisation has never lived up completely to the extraordinary hopes placed upon it in 1945.
Perhaps nothing could.
But standing inside the headquarters made me think about it slightly differently.
The United Nations was never really a promise that countries would stop disagreeing.
It was an attempt to give them somewhere to disagree without immediately reaching for weapons.
That distinction matters.
Behind the famous General Assembly speeches is an enormous amount of work that receives far less attention — humanitarian assistance, refugees, food programmes, peacekeeping, health, education, development and diplomacy.
Some of it succeeds.
Some of it doesn't.
That is part of the story too.
Photographing the UN
From a photographic point of view, the headquarters is fascinating.
The Secretariat is wonderfully simple. From some angles it is almost nothing more than a huge rectangle, yet the glass constantly changes depending on the light and weather.
Moving around the complex, completely different shapes begin appearing.
The curved General Assembly building sits low against the vertical Secretariat. Rows of flagpoles introduce repetition. Marble, concrete and glass sit beside landscaped gardens, sculpture and the East River.
Inside, the atmosphere changes again.
There are great ceremonial spaces, long corridors, artworks, meeting rooms and those instantly recognisable chambers.
What interested me most was photographing the details rather than simply recording another picture of the famous tower.
The places where people actually sit.
The microphones.
The empty chairs.
The rostrum.
The artwork.
The things that normally sit quietly in the background while history is taking place in front of them.
More Than a Building
More than seventy years after its completion, the United Nations Headquarters remains one of New York's most distinctive pieces of modern architecture.
It has also become something much bigger than its architects could ever have designed.
It is a stage.
Sometimes for diplomacy.
Sometimes for confrontation.
Sometimes for speeches that change very little.
And occasionally for decisions that change a great deal.
The United Nations has never ended war, and it certainly hasn't solved every problem placed before it.
But perhaps that isn't the only way to judge it.
The headquarters beside the East River still provides a place where almost every nation on Earth can walk through the same doors, sit in the same room and speak.
In a world that continues to find reasons to divide itself, there is still something rather remarkable about that.
Written and photographed by Daren Frankish
Additional historical archive material has been used to illustrate the development and construction of the United Nations Headquarters.
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