The Big Tent

The 39-story U.N. Secretariat building, on midtown Manhattan's East River shore was almost completed last week and w.ork was beginning on the 59-nation General Assembly hall that will snuggle at its base. Conservative critics had been hard on the tall Secretariat, had compared its marble and glass severity to that of a shoebox or a sandwich set on edge (TIME, June 13). They were going to be equally rocked by the swaybacked Assembly hall.

Both buildings had been designed by a distinguished international team of architects, headed by Wallace K. Harrison (who helped plan Rockefeller Center). When finished, the two would make a dramatic contrast, for while the Secretariat's skyscraper was high, thin arid rigid, the Assembly hall had the concave roof and sides of a low tarpaulin stretched from four corner posts--a difficult and perhaps inefficient construction to handle in stone. As ARCHITECTURAL FORUM put it, the Assembly building "marked an architectural shift--from emphasis on 'function' and structural logic to emphasis on form and the logic of art."

Inside, though, the Assembly building will be elaborately functional. Its central, circular meeting room, capped by a shallow dome, will have tiers of balconies, press boxes and television booths. Built to hold 850 delegates, 900 spectators and 350 reporters, it will supply everyone present with a fixed receiver for listening to translations of what goes on. Delegates' desks will have mikes as well, and a pushbutton voting system. If all goes well, U.N. delegates will be settling into their new desks by the spring of 1952.

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