Palace of Concrete

Not since the Eiffel Tower was topped off in 1889 have Parisians raised such a hullabaloo about a structure. The new $9,010,000 UNESCO Headquarters is a mammoth (by Paris standards) concrete complex that soars up 95 ft. to the top limit allowed by Paris' building code, and spreads over 7 1/2 acres. Where were the plain grey fac,ades, balconies, front-to-sidewalk walls and classical details? Every tradition lover in town was up in arms. To make matters worse, the new structure was directly across from one of the gems of 18th century architecture--the revered Ecole Militaire, facing on the semicircular Place de Fontenoy on Paris' Left Bank. But except for conforming to the curve of the place, UNESCO made no concessions. It is clearly and emphatically modern.

The project got under way six years ago in the kind of comedy of confusion that all Frenchmen relish. A group of five architects, Les Cinq (France's Le Corbusier, Brazil's Lucio Costa, the U.S.'s Walter Gropius, Sweden's Sven Markelius, Italy's Ernesto Rogers), was picked by UNESCO to name Les Trois who would actually design the building. The site was changed twice to placate the jittery guardians of Paris' celebrated skyline. With that act over, the U.S.'s Marcel Breuer, Italy's famed master of concrete, Pier Luigi Nervi, and France's Bernard Zehrfuss could get down to work.

Patterns in Sun. For the office building needed to house UNESCO's 1,080 permanent employees, Breuer found a functional solution: a Y-shaped structure (without air conditioning) that would give maximum light and air for the 600-odd offices. The elevators, stairs and toilets were grouped in a central service core at the axis of the prongs. To cut down glare from floor-to-ceiling windows, Breuer incorporated a variety of sunshade devices (horizontal sun-louvers, vertical slabs, extended brackets holding panes of thermal glass) that varied according to the various sun conditions and enriched the fac,ades with glittering patterns.

Nervi's task was the formidable one of carrying through on the structural problems, making a concrete edifice that would appear not only airy but also monumental and imposing. Placing a building on stilts (pilotis) has been modern architectural fashion ever since France's Le Corbusier introduced it back in the 1920s. But rarely has a column in concrete had such handsome treatment as Nervi evolved for the 72 paired columns that hold the seven-story Secretariat some 16 ft. in the air. Tapered from a rectangular cross section at the top to a near oval at the base, they have all the elegance of classical porticoes.

Equally successful is the butterfly-roofed conference hall. With roof and monumental fac,ade shaped from folded concrete slabs, it attains simple dignity by the drama of its stark engineering. Says Nervi: "At last reinforced concrete has become a 'noble' architectural material."

Bernard Zehrfuss, 48, who built his reputation with low-cost housing units in North Africa, took over on site planning, bulldozed the unconventional structures through Paris' complex building codes, coordinated multilingual teams of workmen.

Failures & Favorites. UNESCO commissioned twelve famed artists, plus designers of 19 countries, to give the finishing touches. In part because the buildings' own vibrant plasticity is almost self-sufficient, in part because artists were brought in after the structures were designed, art and architecture more often clash than chime. Cases in point:

P: Pablo Picasso, who spent weeks sketching compositions based on the theme of an artist painting a model in a skylighted studio, had a sudden change of inspiration when he saw the huge mural panels alotted him. He switched to an enigmatic, allegorical beach scene that has proved to be one of UNESCO's major disappointments (see color pages). No help is the concrete catwalk that cuts across the delegates' lounge some 20 ft. in front of the mural, effectively slicing it in half when seen at a distance.

P: Henry Moore, who struggled for months over the ESC (Education, Science, Culture) of UNESCO, finally decided: "If you put a statue of a teacher reading to a child there, after a while nobody would look at it." Instead, Moore fell back on Henry Moore, vintage 1938, turned out a reclining, Swiss-cheese female, carved out of rich travertine from Michelangelo's old quarry at Carrara (see color). For all its massive ten tons, it fails of monumentality, is less successful than the reinforced concrete canopy behind it that Breuer and Nervi designed as an afterthought.

The staff, which had moved in by last week, found other works more successful. A favorite was the 33-ft.-tall mobile by U.S. Sculptor Alexander Calder. Another was Joan Miro's free-standing ceramic walls (TIME color page, Nov. 3). Also widely admired was the almost-too-pretty 20th century Japanese garden, complete with arched bridge and 82 tons of imported Japanese stones, created by Japanese-American Sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Mexico's Rufino Tamayo, with his mural of Prometheus, gave viewers one of the few art works with a recognizable theme. Unfortunately, it was set in the rear of the main commission room, visible to delegates only on leaving. Staff members also discovered some unexpected rough spots in the building. Items: no safety hooks for window-washers faced with more than 1,000 floor-to-ceiling glass panes; some hot spots where the sunshades failed to do their job.

But as Parisians got used to glass fac,ades and folded concrete, the new UNESCO was steadily winning new friends. "This architecture is done with such talent that it goes perfectly with the Ecole Militaire," decided former Chief of French Museums Georges Salles. "A splendid poem in concrete and glass," said Paris' leading art review, L'Oeil. And from the top of the Eiffel Tower, guides were beginning matter-of-factly to point out UNESCO as one of the marvels of Paris. Modern architecture, like modern art, was beginning to seem like something the French had been in favor of all along.

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