THE SLAB'S THE THING

Slab-shaped buildings--long and narrow but tall enough to be vast--are exciting today's architects as pencil-point skyscrapers did their predecessors. No man has done more than Wallace Harrison to make the idea a reality: he cloaked it with stone in creating Rockefeller Center and with glass in the U.N. Secretariat.

Huge projects like these require the collaboration of many minds. Harrison's partner, Max Abramovitz, and an office force of some 250 were not enough to get U.N.-in-Manhattan off the ground. To start with, Harrison spent four months picking the brains of an advisory panel of ten brilliant architects from ten nations. The following two pages show home-grown effects achieved by six of these consultants. They all found Harrison wide-open to ideas. Says Belgium's Gaston Brunfaut cheerfully: "He is not a businessman like the rest of American architects. He is an idealist ... a kind of aristocrat in a nation of brutes and savages."

The one clear genius in the advisory group is France's cranky Le Corbusier, long a major architectural prophet. In 1936, he helped Brazil's fiery Oscar Niemeyer design a government building (see cut) which obviously served as an important U.N. source. Niemeyer calls his French collaborator "the Leonardo da Vinci of modern times." Now, in his brand-new Marseille apartment house, which has a richness of color and surface that the U.N. notably lacks, Corbusier points the way to even more impressive slabs.

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