On this brisk late fall day, I have been sitting on my patio warmed (slightly) by an outdoor heater, looking at the remaining leaves on the trees and ruminating on what I was certain was slim pickings for today’s #stampoftheday. But, as it turns out, I was wrong and the stamps led me on unexpectedly delightful trip into a seminal fight about architecture, ideals, and power.
The only stamps I could find for today were two issued by the UN on October 25, 1954 that both portray the Palais des Nations in Geneva, home of the UN’s offices on Europe. So the question was what else did I have to say about the UN, which I wrote about in yesterday’s post?
And then the journey began. Perhaps, I thought, I could write something that drew on the fact that the Palais de Nations had been built in the 1930s to house the League of Nations, the UN’s ineffective predecessor. As you may recall from some long-ago history class, the League was an international organization established as part of the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I. But the US Senate refused to ratify that treaty, largely because of concerns about ceding power to the League. As a result, the US never joined the League.
Nevertheless, the League came into being in 1920 and set up headquarters in Geneva, which had long been a locus for international diplomacy. And after several years of deliberation and planning in 1926 the League announced that it would hold an international design competition for a “Palace of Nations,” that would be its permanent home. This Palace, the design brief stated, “should be designed in such a way as to allow [people involved with all parts of the League] to work, to preside and to hold discussions, independently and easily in the calm atmosphere which should prevail when dealing with problems of an international dimension.”
The league asked a jury of nine notable European architects, chaired by Victor Horta, to select the winning design. The committee spent months reviewing submissions from 377 applicants but could not agree on a final choice. Instead it narrowed the list down to 27 finalists, including a modernist building proposed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Although this proposal clearly was one of the strongest (if not the strongest) proposal, the committee didn’t recommend building it. The problem, it appears, is that the international and political elites who were the League’s backers and leaders weren’t comfortable with the modernist design and really wanted something that looked more like a conventional “palace.”
To resolve the impasse, the League then asked five diplomats to select a final design. In December 1927, this group decided the building should be jointly designed by five architects who together had all submitted proposals that were among the 27 cited by the original committee: Henri-Paul Nénot, Julien Flegenheimer, Carlo Broggi, Camille Lefèvre, and Joseph Vago.
Le Corbusier angrily and publicly attacked this decision, which was criticized by many others as well. The diplomats who made the choice “were devoid of any scruples,” he later contended, adding “the reason why [the] design aroused public opinion to the extent it did was because it embodied the spirit of our own age instead of the outworn routine methods of traditional architects of the academic school.”
This was, it bears mention, not a trivial dispute. Rather, given the building’s size and prominence, many architects and architectural historians see the fight as one of the seminal battles of the 20th century.
In the end, the five architects moved forward not only with a new charge but also with a new site because the complex would now include a library funded by John D. Rockefeller. They ultimately proposed a neoclassical structure on a monumental scale: a central building flanked by two horseshoe-shaped wings with severe, geometric façades devoid of decorative elements. (Le Corbusier complained, again unsuccessfully, that this design essentially plagiarized much of what he initially had proposed and reflected little or nothing of what the five architects had suggested in their initial submissions.).
Ironically by the mid 1930s, when it was time to furnish the building’s interior tastes had changed again. According to Kuntz, since “modernism was in full swing…The Palace’s interior embodies the minimalism and functionality of interwar design, two principles excluded from the building’s exterior.”
By the time the League moved into the new building in 1936, it was clear that it was failing. It had been unable to stop the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1932 or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, and by the time the building was complete in 1938 the League had also failed to stop the Spanish Civil War or the Nazi takeovers of Austria or the Sudetenland.
As Samuel Flagg Bemis, an American diplomatic historian who originally supported the League wrote, “The League of Nations has been a disappointing failure….It has been a failure, not because the United States did not join it; but because the great powers have been unwilling to apply sanctions except where it suited their individual national interests to do so, and because Democracy, on which the original concepts of the League rested for support, has collapsed over half the world.”
The League officially ceased operations in 1946 when the UN came into being and the new UN has taken over the site (and overseen expansions of the original facility). Fittingly, when it came time to design the UN’s new headquarters in New York City, the winning design was, in fact a modernist building that clearly drew on many of Le Corbusier’s ideas.
Over the decades, the Palais de Nations complex has been extensively used for a variety of international gatherings. I’m sure some of them were as ineffective as the old League of Nations. But I’m also sure that some of those gatherings have turned out to be important and productive.
And that makes me wonder if, after all of this, the design of the Palais de Nations does, as initially hoped, provide spaces where people can “hold discussions, independently and easily in the calm atmosphere which should prevail when dealing with problems of an international dimension.” I hope so because, we surely are dealing with a host of such pressing issues.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.