From Publishers Weekly
The design for the United Nations headquarters, a landmark of modern architecture, was thrashed out in 1947 in 45 meetings of an international panel of architects including the Swiss Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil, the American Max Abramovitz and Ssu-Ch'eng Liang of China. Dudley, an architect and planner, kept an official record of the meetings and this profusely illustrated, diary-like chronicle, based on his notes, affords an illuminating case study of the process of creative design. Le Corbusier, who attempted to dominate the design team, subsequently claimed that the central idea for the U.N. project was his alone, but according to Dudley, Le Corbusier's preliminary concept, conceived during the site-selection process, proved not wholly suited to the tight urban space finally selected on Manhattan's East River. The final design, Dudley stresses, grew out of a truly cooperative effort. Illustrated.
Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
George Dudley is an architect and planner who was present and kept official notes of the forty-five meetings of the international Board of Design for the United Nations. In this book he unfolds the first eyewitness account of the creation of a landmark building that was functionally and symbolically important in its time, marking the emergence of modern architecture as the dominant language of postwar institutions and cities. In tackling long-standing questions of authorship, Dudley reproduces pages from Le Corbusier's U.N. sketchbook for that period, long thought to be irretrievably lost, and sheds new light on Le Corbusier's contribution to the design process.
A Workshop for Peace is an invaluable record of a design process in which the principal players - Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sven Markelius, Wallace Harrison, Howard Robertson, Louis Skidmore, Julio Vilamajo, Ssu-Ch'eng Liang, and Max Abramovitz disagree with one another and collaborate in turns. The Board of Design took pains to present the design as the unanimous result achieved by this group, and agreed that no individual credit should be given to any one architect. But Le Corbusier began a campaign after he left New York to claim that the central idea for the U.N.'s design was his alone. Dudley carefully analyzes the evolution of the design and compares the scheme to dated entries made in Le Corbusier's sketchbooks during the design process.
