Phantom Thuds

On October 12, 1960, the austere chambers of the United Nations General Assembly witnessed an unprecedented disruption when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transformed footwear into political theater. Amid remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong criticizing Soviet imperialism, Khrushchev—the revolutionary-turned-statesman who had survived Stalin’s purges to succeed him—allegedly removed his shoe and struck his desk repeatedly. The percussive protest was preserved only in disputed eyewitness accounts, and yet we have to imagine that the sharp staccato thuds reverberated through the suddenly hushed chamber like diplomatic gunfire. Khrushchev’s performance represented far more than a momentary breach of decorum; it exemplified the theatricalization of geopolitical discourse at a pivotal moment when nuclear superpowers competed through symbolic gestures calibrated for maximum impact. That we must aurally reconstruct this moment from conflicting testimonies only amplifies its mythological resonance.

Sound, both as an effect and a constitutive element of architecture, emerges as a central theme in Olga Touloumi’s Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior. This revisionist history of a landmark edifice takes readers on an unexpected journey before arriving at the celebrated Board of Design, whose luminaries included Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer. Touloumi first explores the rich prehistory of international cooperation, examining ambitious if sometimes quixotic visions that preceded the United Nations’ founding in 1945. Norwegian American artist Hendrik Christian Andersen’s World City of Communications (1918) stands as one such example, with its monumental Tower of Progress designed to host congresses devoted to scientific inquiry and public hygiene. The architectural evolution of the League of Nations headquarters provides another crucial antecedent, from Le Corbusier’s acoustically innovative 1927 proposal (developed with sound specialist Gustave Lyon) to the sonorously stifling neoclassical design that eventually got built (completed in 1938). Touloumi’s analysis extends beyond conventional architectural history through case studies that reveal the subtle interplay of sound and space: the modifications made to the San Francisco Opera House reception hall in which the United Nations Charter was ratified, Dan Kiley’s reconfiguration of Nuremberg’s Courtroom 600 for the International Military Tribunal, and the carefully orchestrated chambers of the UN Headquarters’ principal organs. These spaces collectively constitute what Touloumi terms “global interiors”—environments that “circulate around the world as meaningful representations of international relations, ultimately becoming the message and medium of liberal internationalism.”

The architectural narratives in Assembly by Design encompass more than mere aesthetics, for these global interiors exemplify sophisticated syntheses of design, sound engineering, and informational graphics. The materiality of these environments, Touloumi observes, represents a rich assemblage of surfaces engineered specifically for their acoustic properties, some conceived to reflect sound waves and others to baffle them. These spaces were also outfitted with an intricate network of recording apparatuses and, perhaps most remarkably, pioneering simultaneous interpretation systems. The latter innovation proved particularly significant, enabling interpreters to receive, translate, and record microphonic speech in real time—a technological achievement that merged architectural, acoustic, and linguistic considerations into a cohesive whole. For Touloumi, the UN “fashioned itself as the voice—and possibly the ear—of the world.”

I suppose that Assembly by Design could be billed as yet another dutiful history of the UN Headquarters, something along the lines of Adam Bartos and Christopher Hitchens’s comprehensive International Territory: The United Nations 1945–95 and George R. Dudley’s eyewitness account A Workshop for Peace: Designing the United Nations Headquarters—both published to commemorate the UN’s fiftieth anniversary. Or, given Touloumi’s focus on media technologies and global politics, it could be grouped with Fred R. Turner’s The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2013). That book is a bravado study of the ways that immersive media environments emerged not merely as technological innovations but as conscious instruments for fostering democratic consciousness—an important observation that provides a crucial parallel with Touloumi’s central thesis. Meanwhile, her sonic purview owes a special debt to Emily Thompson’s groundbreaking The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening (2004). Works such as these challenge traditional visual-centric interpretations of the history of architecture by examining how sound technologies and acoustic experiences fundamentally influenced twentieth-century culture, design, and spatial practices. Assembly by Design closely follows this trajectory, showing how the UN Headquarters came to be a building of truly global consequence, where sound technology and design embodied international dialogue itself.

The examples of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and Trusteeship Council chambers are especially telling in this regard. In the ECOSOC Chamber, Swedish architect Sven Markelius deliberately exposed mechanical systems—air ducts, fans, and technical infrastructure—in the area above the spectators’ bank, creating a “visible” plenum that cleverly echoed the dual meaning of the term itself: both the technical space housing building systems and an assembly of people gathered for deliberation. For the Council Chamber, Danish designer Finn Juhl specified the opposite approach, suspending this building viscera over the delegates’ section, revealing different conceptions of what should be exposed to the public and what remains hidden. Mediating decision-makers and observers was the famed horseshoe table, whose shape was the subject of intense deliberations within the Board of Design. As Touloumi notes, the table itself became “an instrument of diplomacy and an apparatus for multilateralism,” yet one designed precisely to limit participation while projecting accessibility. (Tellingly, the organizers of the first Non-Aligned Movement summit, held in Belgrade in 1961, dispensed with the horseshoe altogether. In its place, they substituted a large oval table that signaled parity among participating states—nations that had been excluded from key UN activities.)

The harmonizing stylings of the two chambers—what the journalist Olga Gueft appropriately described as “meeting-hall-theatre”—aestheticize bureaucracy while obscuring fundamental questions about power. Their calculated performance of transparency thus embodies the UN’s contradictory position: While claiming to represent global interests through its modernist, infrastructural design language, the organization operates through fundamentally exclusive mechanisms, maintaining traditional power structures beneath a progressive veneer.

Beyond the technocratic precincts of the UN Headquarters, Assembly by Design also introduces readers to a host of other provisional spaces designed by the UN and adjacent agencies to advance principles of global peace and security. In these chapters, we’re introduced to the likes of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt or Constantinos Doxiadis, two figures known in architectural circles who worked within the United Nations as regional planning experts. Tyrwhitt played a crucial role in the UN’s global outreach by directing the 1954 UN Regional Seminar and International Exhibition in New Delhi, where she conceptualized the “village center” that became a model for how the UN could ensconce itself in rural communities. Doxiadis, a UN technical adviser, launched the journal Ekistics (initially the Tropical Housing & Planning Monthly Bulletin) in response to the New Delhi seminar, establishing what would become an influential platform connecting development and planning professionals worldwide.

Touloumi undoubtedly deepens our understanding of Cold War modernism. However, her focus on architectural innovations could have been leveraged to provide insights into the history of international organizations themselves. As a self-consciously novel study of the United Nations, Assembly by Design might have explored how its crystalline, wired-up Turtle Bay campus reflects Western jurisprudence through both its laws and protocols. This Western bias is consequential, as political theorists and scientists have observed how it enables anomalous behavior by Security Council members. (After the war, the political theorist and former Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt would argue that international law is essentially European law, justifying the “exceptional” nature of Western jurisprudence.) Within this context, it’s significant that the only arm of the United Nations capable of prescribing or critiquing its ambit and agendas—the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—is overlooked by Touloumi. The ICJ’s home—the Peace Palace in The Hague, where it first convened in 1946—also offers an illuminating architectural counterpoint that might have made an important episode in Assembly by Design. Designed by French architect Louis-Marie Cordonnier (with contributions from the Delft designer J. A. G. van der Steur) and completed in 1913, this Dutch Renaissance structure does not appear to flaunt its technological innovations in the same way as the other projects analyzed in the book—even as it played an eclectic and important role in the United Nations’ framework. As historian Mark Crinson has observed in Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017), Cordonnier’s nod to architectural history served a strategic purpose: to present the ICJ as a venerable and impartial authority with deep historical roots.

Touloumi begins her account with a harrowing incident from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2017, which was televised to the world. When accused Bosnian Croat war criminal Slobodan Praljak drank poison in a suicide attempt while on the witness stand (he later died), the global interior of a multilateral organization permeated global media. Only in the book’s final pages does Touloumi acknowledge, by way of a brief survey of mainstream films, that this was hardly the public’s first peek. Pop culture can crystallize the significance of something that seems remote or inaccessible to everyday audiences. It is plausible, for instance, that prior to the release of Stanley Donen’s comedy espionage thriller Charade (1963), people may have had little idea as to what a simultaneous interpreter was. This is exactly what Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) does for a living at EURESCO (a UNESCO stand-in). The architecture of the UN General Assembly also figures prominently in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005), which follows an African languages translator played by Nicole Kidman who overhears the planning of an assassination plot through her audio equipment. The Interpreter was the first production since Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) to film at the UN Headquarters, an arrangement that required a good deal of diplomacy; Pollack negotiated directly with then Secretary General Kofi Annan to shoot scenes inside the General Assembly and other secure spaces deemed off-limits to filmmakers. Watching Kidman’s Silvia Broome at work, we catch glimpses of the technical infrastructure of simultaneous interpretation: the microphones, headsets, amplifiers, recording devices, and signal compressors essential to General Assembly operations.

The sonic history of the UN General Assembly finds damning contemporary examination in Johan Grimonprez’s film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2023), which juxtaposes Khrushchev’s theatrical table-pounding with the righteous protest by the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage following the 1961 assassination of Democratic Republic of the Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba—a murder the UN’s rhetoric of peace did nothing to prevent. These sonic eruptions—precisely what the building’s soundproofing interventions sought to control—expose what Touloumi’s architectural analysis inadvertently reveals about postwar internationalism itself: Beneath its veneer of simultaneous translation and aural precision lay fundamental hypocrisies no technological marvel could disguise. The UN fashioned itself as “the voice and ear of the world” while its global interiors served primarily to legitimize neocolonial power structures through architectural grandeur and technological spectacle. Today, as the organization wallows in irrelevance—impotent on Gaza, Ukraine, and countless other conflicts—Touloumi’s examination of these meticulously designed spaces offers an unintended material history of internationalism’s hollow performance. The phantom thuds of Khrushchev’s shoe and the defiant songs of African American women disrupting the General Assembly’s sterile acoustics remind us that the most truthful sounds in the UN’s history have been those its architects desperately tried to exclude—the raw expressions of dissent that exposed the contradictions embedded in the very foundations of this temple to a liberal internationalism that never truly existed.