Workshop For the World

For four months, ten of the world's most honored architects had stood together in a Rockefeller Center drafting room, playing with blocks, scribbling sketches, and disagreeing in a half dozen languages. Their own small quarrels were only the beginning. Last week their published plans for a skyscraper United Nations headquarters set off a louder dispute.

All the critics had to go on was a generalized but nonetheless official sketch and a somewhat glamorized interpretation of it by LIFE (see cut). But it was enough to raise the hackles of conservative architects. Said the president of Manhattan's Municipal Art Society, Architect Charles C. Platt: "It seems to me simply slabs turned up and slabs lying on their belly, with no unity of composition. . . . A diabolical dream. . . ." Cried Perry Coke Smith, of the American Institute of Architects: "It looks like a sandwich on edge and a couple of freight cars. . . . I fail to see how an office building that narrow can be efficiently done." Engineer Max Foley, president of the New York Building Congress, was a little kinder. "There must be something in that darn thing," said he, "that I don't understand."

Snowy-maned Frank Lloyd Wright, the crotchety old dean of U.S. architects, is no conservative, but he too had an objection: the plan suffered from "skyscraperism . . . a sinister emblem for world power. . . . Grass the ground," ordered Wright, "where the proposed U.N. skyscraper would stand."

The man who headed the planning team, U.S. Architect Wallace Kirkman Harrison, had expected criticism; Rockefeller Center, which Harrison helped design, was now a much admired part of Manhattan's jagged-edged landscapes but it had raised storms of protest back in 1931. Within Harrison's ten-man team there was a basic unanimity; all ten shared his liking for strict functionalism. Among them: Brazil's brilliant young (39) Oscar Niemeyer, and France's Le Corbusier (real name, Charles Edouard Jeanneret), who invented functionalism's favorite phrase when he described modern houses as "machines for living."

The plan agreed on by the ten called for a vast "machine for working." The shell would consist of two office skyscrapers, 45 and 30 stories high, and two flat meeting halls, widely spaced in a six-block park. Said Wallace Harrison severely: "The world hopes for a symbol of peace; we have given them a workshop for peace."

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