Building the United Nations Headquarters as Worldmaking? Settler Colonialism,Modernist Architecture,and the Material Infrastructure for the Post-World WarII Order

United Nations Headquarters as Worldmaking: Lenapehoking in the Global Settler Colonial Present

The UNHQ campus, like all of Manhattan, was erected on unceded lands of Lenapehoking, the track of land between what is simultaneously fashioned as sections of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York states in the United States. While the violent dispossession of this land from Indigenous Lenape peoples dates back to the 17th century with the Dutch West India Company and subsequently the British and the American governments, the Lenape continue to inhabit Manhattan, other parts of Lenapehoking, as well as reservations where they were displaced to in Wisconsin and Oklahoma. These displacements were continued through the post-World War II worldmaking project in the institutions housed in the UNHQ, where representatives hailing from some of the 193 member states descend for annual meetings.

The United Nations institutional mechanisms were intended to provide a central “harmonizing” institution for deliberative cooperation that maintained international peace and security by upholding the equal rights of states and self-determination (United Nations Charter 1945). ¹ The nation state—rather than Indigenous communities or individual citizens—are the central actors in the UN. The United Nations Charter, as an international treaty signed on by state parties, was to be adhered to by member states, despite the contradictions in the preamble rhetoric: “We the peoples of the United Nations.” Due to the primacy of the state and the institutional privileges granted to the victors of WWII, or Permanent Five (P5) (People’s Republic of China (PRC) would gain the seat from the Republic of China in 1971) in the UN Security Council, the United Nations—and international organizations more broadly—tend to be interpreted as the machineries through which powerful states assert power. ² At the same time, international institutions like the United Nations have the capacity to shape international politics through the capacity to “both regulate and constitute the world” through the fashioning of norms, regulating conflict, and in institutionalizing relations between states (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004: 9).

The setting of the UNHQ continues the project of Lenape land dispossession. In accordance with the structural logic of settler colonialism, the consolidation of territorial control by the settler polity is ongoing despite changes in settler administrators. Lenape displacement began with the myth of a 17th century transaction with the Dutch West India Company traders, then was continued by Great Britain and United States. Despite the absence of a concrete document of the transaction, historians upheld the myth of a transaction that granted exclusive access to large swathes of Manhattan. The Dutch West India Company used the myth of the transaction as justification to erect an exclusionary fortification located at what is now known as Wall Street to enable the flourishing of the settler polity (Connolly, 2018). ³ For the traction of the myth, look no further than the New York City seal, which depicts a member of the Lenape and a Dutch settler above the year 1625, when the settlement of New Amsterdam was established. However, Lenape recognize this “sale” as nothing more than a myth to absolve the centuries of violent displacement, expanding territorial control of the American government, and the destruction of the land through pollution and exploitation of Manhattan (The Greene Space, 2020). As Cherokee playwright, Mary Kathryn Nagle explains, the myth of the transaction is “deeper in the American psyche than we realize” because Americans—and visitors to New York from around the world—want to claim the city (quoted in Center for Brooklyn History, 2022).

The history of land dispossession and displacement of the Lenape is at the very foundations of the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous People’s History of the United States captures this history in a pithy statement:

To take seriously the settler colonial origins of the United States and the displacement of the Lenape—and all Indigenous communities on in what is fashioned as the United States—necessitates the consideration for the ongoing effects of those historical processes and structures not only on the communities, but on the very land itself. In “Manhattan is a Lenape word”, Indigenous poet, Natalie Diaz, explains that “even a watch must be wound,” which suggests the necessity to return to the past in order to continue in the present (Diaz, 2020). Thus, despite the current configuration of the UNHQ campus as international territory somehow removed from the United States, the site was made possible through both the structural logic and practice of Indigenous land dispossession tied to the symbolic and physical elimination of the Lenape.

Reframing the UNHQ through the settler colonial foundations brings into sharper focus the effects of the post-WWII system. To clarify, global order is always a normative political project that asserts a way of organizing relations that is subject to contestation. If one accepts the post-WWII international order safeguarded by the UN system as a competing order, then reading the histories of Manhattan correspond to a global order shaped by the logics of domination in settler colonialism. Indeed, Lorenzo Veracini refers to the current moment as the “settler colonial present” because settler colonialism has “gone global” as a phenomenon that shapes the current spatial, political, and interpersonal relations (Veracini, 2010: 56). Scholars of settler colonialism argue that the relations of settler invasion endure as a structural condition, despite acknowledgment of past violence and injustices, the return of looted objects, or the changes in territorial administration.

The majority of scholars of settler colonialism follow Patrick Wolfe’s (2006: 388) foundational claim that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event” because settlers “come to stay.” This structure is premised on the symbolic and physical elimination of Indigenous peoples through land dispossession along with the consolidation of settler colonial territorial control (Wolfe, 2006; Veracini, 2010, 2015). By structure, scholars of settler colonialism refer to a particular kind of spatial logic to facilitate the expansion and flourishing of the settler polity at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism differs from franchise colonialism based on the relationship to land. Franchise colonialism extracts resources from the colonial “periphery” to fuel the “metropole” and thus can be brought to an end with the conclusion of extraction or changes in administrative control. Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is a structural configuration that persists in the organization and reorganization of settler space to continually further the settler project, despite national independence (Wolfe, 2006). This recalcitrant structure is maintained through “sustained iteration in the present” (Hugill, 2017: 8) via racialized property regimes (Bhandar, 2014; Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019), military and police violence (Crosby, 2021), and forms of knowledge (Hawari et al., 2019). This paper contributes to the role of both the built environment and international institutions in the reiteration of settler colonial relations and spatial logics in the present. Settler colonialism, then, persists despite national independence, although the shift from a settler state to international territory, as was the case in the UNHQ, remains a largely undeveloped phenomenon taken on in settler colonial studies literature. As such, the focus on the UNHQ, and the UNGA building in particular, accords with David Hugill’s (2017: 7) call for “new empirical tests” to explore the potential for settler colonial theory to analyze unexplored processes of spatial domination in new geographies.

This structural logic of settler colonialism intersects with the racialism associated with modernist architectural forms used on the UNGA building. The ongoing spatial logic of settler colonialism that dispossess Indigenous land complements the racializing logic of modernist architecture. As Cheng et al. (2020: 4) argue, 20^th century architects obscured the influence of race-thinking on architectural styles through claims to universal forms that were spread through “spatial practices like classifying, mapping, planning, and building” such as the UNGA building. My approach does not dismiss the notion of coloniality—the combination of forms of knowledge and racialized exploitation in capitalist socioeconomic structure that emerged in 15^th century Americas—but rather emphasizes the importance of land, specifically, the built environment as a source to disentangle how racialized architecture and settler colonialism shaped the postwar international order. The built environment is integral to the settler colonial project because to consolidate control over territory necessitates erecting structures to facilitate settlement. In other words, the built environment is the very means of settler colonialism.

To ensure conceptual clarity, I want to distinguish architectural modernism or modernist architecture from notions of modernity. Whereas modernity refers to the entangled processes of colonialism and capitalism (often framed through the lens of industrialization rather than colonial exploitation), modernist architecture refers to specific architectural forms that proliferated between the late 19^th century and the 1970s; modernist architectural form is a broad conceptual tent that includes different “styles” such as high modernism, brutalism, international style, Italian rationalism, and many others. Despite the broad framing, modernist architectural design sought a rupture with previous built forms of classical architecture, often associated with either features of Greek or Roman temples or, alternatively, dense “traditional” spaces (Wright, 2002), by prioritizing functional spaces that assumed a universalism in material form (López-Durán, 2018; Wright 1991; Rabinow, 1989). However, the assumed universalism and breaks with the past were, in fact, obscuring embedded racialization that occurred through design elements, such as ornamentation and forms. As I will discuss below, the universalism of the “international style” that is used to refer to UNGA building was, in fact, laden with racial hierarchies derived from 19^th century eugenics but granted legitimacy through the UNHQ buildings. The politics of the built environment not only shape the structural logic of settler colonialism but also prompt broader questions on the relationship of race, the built environment, and international politics.

Building the United Nations General Assembly Building

The UNGA building is a relic of mid-20th century architecture. This first building, upon entering between 45th and 46th streets, is splayed out from the central circular dome of the Assembly Hall between East 42nd and 46th, the East River, and below the towering secretariat building. This low-rise time capsule of Portland stone and asymmetric angles was designed and constructed between 1947 and 1952, when the first session was held inside the structure. Upon entering, one feels like they have stepped back in time in what became this primary meeting building on the United Nations Headquarters campus; the curtain wall above the entrance lets in natural light, while the steel columns embedded in the sinuous floor platforms for each of the four floors rise above the lobby. The UNHQ site is fashioned as international territory, and thus not subject to federal, state, or local jurisdiction of the United States, although the site is unceded Lenape territory. ⁴ The UNGA houses the General Assembly Hall, the site of General Assembly meetings, where six representatives from each of the 193 member states convene for annual meetings between September and December or in the case of emergency sessions. The adjoining two UN Headquarters (UNHQ) buildings house four of the remaining six organs of the UN. The Conference Building houses three key organs in the United Nations Security Council Chamber, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Chamber, and the now defunct Trusteeship Council Chamber, whereas the Secretariat tower houses the main contingent of the Secretariat; the sixth organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is based in the Hague and other UN offices are scattered throughout the world.

The unceded Lenape land where the UNGA was erected was the outcome of contestations between business and political elites within the American settler society. Philadelphia, the Bronx, and White Plains (and over 20 other possibilities around the world) were all destinations under consideration before Nelson D. Rockefeller convinced his father John D. Rockefeller to purchase the strip of land that would be the eventual location in 1946. Rockefeller had a vested interest in establishing the UN at this location, as the site was previously intended by the owner, William Zeckendorf, to be “X City,” a sprawling residential and commercial complex to rival Rockefeller Center, constructed in 1930s. Yet Zeckendorf ran into issues with demolishing the existing factories and evicting residences due to the alliance between Rockefeller and high-powered Commissioner of city planning, Robert Moses (1942–1960). Moses’ vision entailed razing all industrial and residential tenement buildings both within and beyond Zeckendorff’s tract of land in order to build the East Side Highway. Moses’ “urban renewal” scheme was part of the continual reproduction of power in the settler colonial enterprise that was common practice in the administration of 20^th century American cities (and continues to this day through gentrification).

Urban renewal reinforced settler colonial origins of Manhattan through the consolidation of racialized enclaves that were deepened by racist administrative practices, such as preferential treatment for access to home loans (so called, “redlining”) and the distribution of public services, investment, and creation of infrastructure that both marginalized and decimated urban communities. The material effect of urban renewal schemes was the largescale destruction of existing communities, buildings, and businesses in order to build anew, typically for the real estate speculation that fueled the settler colonial enterprise. In the case of the UNHQ, Moses’ aim to construct the East Side Highway aligned with Rockefeller’s and ultimately led to the UNHQ being placed in its current location. In other words, the mass clearing of built form needed to erect the UNHQ was premised on the instrumentalization of the land for the American settler colonial project’s postwar global ambitions. Ultimately, Nelson Rockefeller convinced his father to purchase the land for $8.5M, then to donate the land to the city. The site was then made available to the United Nations Planning Commission, which was tasked with rubber stamping the final decision on the location in 1947. The US Congress would provide a $65M interest-free loan to the United Nations for the construction costs, which was eventually paid back in full in 1982.

The convergence of populations from around the world to the current site was a point of concern for racists within the United States government. For example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson expressed concerns that the arrival of the UN would be a point of potential unrest, given it would contribute to “a crowded center of conflicting races and nationalities” ostensibly as a threat to white supremacy, which he advocated for in parts of present-day Zimbabwe (Zipp, 2010: 39–40). Acheson’s racial anxiety was experienced by Black diplomats posted to the UN in the 1950s and 1960s, as they faced daily discrimination in housing and explicit intimidation beyond the international zone of the United Nations (Ibid., 40). After the site was approved by the General Assembly, then based in Lake Success, New York, the task was to craft the architectural team to design and to construct the building.

In February 1947, twenty-one state representatives submitted names of architects to be set on the ten-member Board of Consultants, selected by Wallace K. Harrison (Nelson Rockefeller’s personal architect who was tapped by Moses to head the group) and approved by Trygve Lie, the UN Secretary General. The team, which was to be based on the “widest possible geographical distribution” (New York Times, 1947), was to collaborate for the designs of the building from an office at Rockefeller Center in early 1947. The international architects came into tension with Moses’ view of the site: “What do these foreign fellows know about our foundations” was his response to Le Corbusier’s (representing France) claims that New York City was a city of slums that could be transformed through his architectural designs, like the UN Building (The New Yorker, 1947). Le Corbusier worked with the nine other members hailing from Belgium, Canada, Soviet Union, China, United Kingdom, Sweden, Uruguay, Brazil, and Australia. These architects, selected for the Board of Design, were all invested in the idea that modernist architecture in general, and the international style in particular “transcended national and cultural differences” (United Nations), because the UNHQ, including the UNGA building, were to “express universality and integration of the arts” (Harrison in Phaidon Editors, 2008: 386). The 10 architects produced over fifty different models that were critiqued, discussed, and adjusted by all members of the team before a composite was selected, meaning that no one architect had the final design. Even though Le Corbusier claimed credit for the design—going so far as to publish a text entitled UN Headquarters: Practical Application of a Philosophy of the Domain of Building (1947)—his final design for the UNGA was ultimately reworked by Harrison. The final design outcome was celebrated by architects and architectural historians as “shorn of ideology” through the universalism of modernist architectural language (Betsky, 2005: 25). As a result, Philip C. Johnson, who coined the phrase international style (see below), referred to the building as “the best modern piece of planning he had ever seen (New York Times, 1947).” But this self-fashioned universalism of the UNGA building was, in fact, obfuscating both the racialized assumptions of the built form and the literal settler colonial foundations of stolen land upon which it was erected.

The design undertaken by the members of the Board of Design sought to both reflect and to facilitate the global ambitions of the organization through these claims to universalism. The 10 architects from around the world quite literally sought to use architecture as a harmonizing force to stabilize a post-WWII order toward the larger objective of maintaining international peace and security. During the design phase, Oscar Niemeyer, who would become renowned after his designs for the Secretariat building were largely accepted, explained:

For the architects on design team, the task was not simply to represent the aspirations of the United Nations, but to quite literally forge them through the architecture. In accordance with modernist architectural principles, these architects were invested in the idea that the built environment held the potential to transform individuals and wider societies. This is an idea best captured by Le Corbusier's dictum: “architecture or revolution” in Towards a New Architecture (1989: 269). This not only points to the aims of the institution to thwart Indigenous struggle for land and postcolonial power redistribution, but also serves to reinforce these structures of power through built form. In other words, architecture was a tool through which to manage contestation by shaping individuals and wider societies. This speaks to Le Corbusier’s investment in Lemarckian eugenics, which posited that human evolution was driven by adaptation to environmental changes, and thus the built environment could be harnessed to quite literally reshape humans and, by extension, societies (López-Durán, 2018). In accordance with these principles, Le Corbusier and the luminaries of the modernist movement working on the UNGA building aspired to render not only new forms of living (ala Corbusier’s famous statement that the house was a “machine for living”), but more importantly, to cast a “new form of man,” which is to say the citizen of the nation state through architectural design (López-Durán, 2018: 145). Here, the material structure of the UNGA building marks the convergence of institutional aspirations to stabilize liberal global order through deliberative diplomacy with the modernist architectural aspirations to transform individuals and wider societies, albeit all at the expense of Indigenous land dispossession and architectural designs rooted in racism.

Worldmaking of Modernist Architecture

The worldmaking of modernist architecture of the UNGA building was obscured over time. The modernist architecture is a product of melding race and architectural “styles” that emerged out of 19^th century racial pseudoscience (Davis, 2019). The result was worldmaking through the architectural form of the UNGA building by situating it as a product of the twin assumptions of European origins spreading throughout the world and the blurring of racial pseudoscience within architectural typologies or styles, such as international style. Here, I am drawing on a group of scholars reading critical race studies into architectural history in order to critique the embedded racism that continues to shape the figures, categories, styles, and buildings of the modernist movement and the wider discipline of the history of architecture (Lokko, 2000; Davis II, 2019; Cheng, 2020; Brown, 2017; López-Durán, 2018). For example, Charles L. Davis (2019) and Adrienne Brown (2017) document the ways seminal figures, such as Louis Sullivan, who famously coined the defining modernist movement dictum, “form follows function,” translated racialized notions of “natural laws” into the ornamentation and building elements of modernist architecture (Brown, 2017: 96–97). However, the key to this worldmaking of modernist architecture is the obfuscation of these racial associations throughout the 20th century that was institutionalized through the UNGA building. Given that race is a relational social construct that is embedded within narrations and histories of differentiation as well as subjective self-definitions, these self- and imposed definitions are always in the process of becoming rather than fixed or static (Shohat and Stam, 2014; Cheng et al., 2020). The obfuscation of race in relation to modernist architecture unfolds as an ongoing process through both the production and application of knowledge that fetishizes modernist architectural style, while glossing over both the conditions of production and underpinning logic through which it was produced.

The UNGA building is considered a “shining example” of modernist structure (Betsky, 2005: 10). Despite this connection between modernist architecture and the UNGA, Lewis Mumford critiqued the UNGA building as muddling the key dictum of form follows function by claiming the sculptural form of the building took precedence over the functional use of the spaces. Part of these connections between the UNHQ and modernist architecture harken back to the key figure, Le Corbusier. The UNGA building most closely resembles Le Corbusier’s model 23A, which adapted his sweeping design principles outlined in Radiant City (1924), into a low-level building within a small strip of Manhattan gridiron. The juxtaposition of the UNGA building with the 39-story Secretariat tower brought together architectural production with urban scale that would shape subsequent canonical buildings by Le Corbusier in Unite d’habitation (1952) and the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh (1962) (Benevolo, 1971: 679–680). This means that the UNGA was not only premised on racialized architectural principles, but also the very basis for subsequent iconic buildings that drew inspiration from the UNGA building were made possible through the settler colonial foundations upon which the UNGA was constructed. Corbusier claimed credit for the outcome—although this has been refuted by Harrison—and asserted that the building introduced a “world architecture, world, not international, for therein we shall respect the human, natural, and cosmic laws” (Le Corbusier as quoted in Davis II, 2019: 228). While the notions of universalism associated with the international style in modernist architecture was asserted since the early 20^th century, the UNGA building and UNHQ buildings in general, gave credence to these claims, despite Corbusier’s attempt to distinguish between them.

This association between universalism and the specific form of modernist architecture of the UNGA building was forged through a 1932 architecture exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The curators, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., coined the term international style modernist architecture to refer to what they fashioned as a new style emerging from Le Corbusier’s 1986 text, Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture). It was through this exhibit—and accompanying exhibit text—that the curators claimed that international style originated based on principles of design in Western Europe, but were spreading throughout the world. In other words, the very foundational examples and buildings of the international style were made possible by the construction through European settler colonial projects around the world up until the 1960s. Indeed, many of these structures are now of interest to European-based architectural historians and preservationists, because as Sharon Rotbard (2015: 171–172) argues, the “best places to examine modern[ist] architecture remain outside of Europe, in urban spaces which were developed under colonial governance.” It is no coincidence that much of this modernist architecture in cities like Brasilia or Tel Aviv was produced through settler colonial projects because European architects were given greater artistic, legal, and economic license in colonial urban settings, albeit with the caveat that all construction furthered the aims of settlement and colonial administrative control (Wright, 1991). However, the tradeoff was that European architects gained national and international acclaim based on associations with international style designs that could be found across different settler colonial geographies. ⁵ And nowhere was this acclaim more useful than in gaining a seat on the Board of Design, where the stature of each architect grew even further by fashioning the building design as universal.

The second form of worldmaking operating through the modernist architecture of the UNGA was the recoding of racial pseudoscience into built form. This race-ordering within architectural styles simultaneously produced race through the built environment and garnered racial associations with built form. Crucially, these racialized assumptions that underpinned these associations between race and form became more obscure with time (Davis II, 2019; López-Durán, 2018). Consider the characterizations of ornamentation by key luminaries, such as Alfred Loos and Le Corbusier. Corbusier’s project was to transform architecture design to meet the changing demands of the urbanizing, industrializing, and rebuilding Europe of the interwar years. His prescriptions built upon the work of Sullivan and more explicitly, Austrian Alfred Loos’ seminal Ornament and Crime (1908) manifesto. ⁶ In Ornament and Crime, Loos (1912) charged ornamentation as “an index of cultural development” that delineated between “degenerate” and “alien” forms of the less developed “Kaffir, the Persian, the Slovak” or the “Papuan” as the “high points of their existence” in opposition to the apex of “art” that was the sleek lines of modernist architectural form emanating from Europe, circulating to European colonies, and to the UNGA building (Loos, 1912: 19, 23–24). For Corbusier, there was a need to remove ornamentation in universal buildings like the UNGA structure because “the peasant loves ornament” since it is one of the “primitive resources” that were “suited to simple races, peasants and savages (Corbusier, 1986: 143).” But the learned person, presumably enlightened by living, learning, and practicing design, architecture, or urban planning in Europe, gained access to “culture,” which Corbusier defined as the ability to determine the “essential” elements of architectural form fit for this new age (Ibid., 38). By gaining the ability to determine what was deemed essential in design, European modernist architects like Corbusier were also able to determine which forms were as expendable and exogenous as what were construed as the racialized non-beings associated with them. And thus, by asserting the universalism of modernist designs in the UNGA building, Le Corbusier and the Board of Designers architects blotted out all architectural forms—and associated “races” and societies, such as Indigenous peoples—that did not register within this framework in much the same way as the UN Charter system prioritized the aims of member states with the effect of marginalizing Indigenous sovereignties.