It is a building with enormous symbolic and instru...

It is a building with enormous symbolic and instrumental power for the world. There decisions are made every day that will affect the planet, more or less. Inside the air that is breathing is international, is to leave the United States for a while to any other part.

The headquarters of the United Nations in New York is a complex of buildings. Most of the visit takes place in the Secretariat Tower. You also enter the huge chamber of the UN General Assembly and the Security Council Chamber. During your visit to the building you will see works of art donated by each of the member countries. There are even remnants of twisted metal caused by nuclear explosions in Japan, recalling the brutality of the war.

The visits to the UN last about an hour and the Visitor Center is accessed through the entrance of located on 1st Avenue, at 46th Street in Manhattan.

Being an extraterritorial and international organization, at the end of the 40s it was decided to entrust the design of the headquarters of the United Nations to a committee of architects from different nations. The idea was to represent with this act the pluricultural and unifying spirit of the UN.

The American Wallace Harrison (architect of the Rockefeller Center and design coordinator of the Lincoln Center) was in charge of leading the group of architects who would design the building. The dynamic that he established was the following: each participant would present at least one proposal, then all would be discussed together until arriving at a final agreed-upon product. Something like a rain of architectural ideas.

The certain thing is that, more than collaboration, it became a hard competition of egos, in which more than 50 proposals tried to impose themselves on the others. Among the "competitors" were the famed French architect Le Corbusier and his Brazilian disciple Oscar Niemeyer. Because of the international fame of Le Corbusier, he always took the win, with Niemeyer being the only one who managed to counterbalance him.

In the end, the winning design was indeed the proposal of Le Corbusier -Scheme 23A-, but yes, with important modifications made by Niemeyer.

Another version of this story says that the final project is actually by Niemeyer, who managed to see the light after Wallace Harrison convinced Le Corbusier that his work was no more than an imitation of his ideas, so he had won ...