Published: February 27, 2025; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Following World War II, architects were invited to build, both literally and metaphorically, the United Nations, the new organization to manage the transition from a colonial to an institutional organization of the world. Inside courtrooms, theaters, industrial plants, and ultimately the permanent UN headquarters, architects debated democratic form, the role of mass media, and the very structure of diplomacy. The task was an impossible one: to gather the entire world in one place, to design a global assembly. The result was the emergence of a new type of space, the “global interior,” a diplomatic spatial apparatus formed in the intersection of debates on media governmentality and corporate technique.
Based on the book Assembly by Design, this talk will examine the evolution of the UN’s global interiors from constitutive imaginaries that legitimized the organization to articulation points of a global bureaucracy in a multipolar world. The talk will situate those spaces within debates on liberal democracies, the public sphere, and multilateral internationalism. These spaces, originally designed as the anchors of the UN Headquarters, framed the political activity of the United Nations but also endowed the organization with metaphors to invoke on a global scale while concealing liberal political and economic forces installing new asymmetries in the background.
“Assembly by Design” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.
Olga Touloumi is an associate professor of architectural history at Bard College. Her first book, Assembly by Design, situates mid-20th-century architectural constructions of global governance within debates on media democracies and liberal internationalism. Touloumi has co-edited Sound Modernities, a volume on how acoustics and sound technologies transformed modern architectural culture during the twentieth century, and with Theodora Vardouli, Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, a volume about the exchanges between designers and computational technologists in Europe and North America. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Theory Review, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. Touloumi is the co-founder of the intersectional group Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC). Her new project concerns a feminist microhistory of architectural practice and pedagogy through the life and works of architect and crocheter Christine Benglia-Bevington.
For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.