_{Post Card, Les Palais des Nations}

Researching for a paper about the construction of the headquarters of the League of Nations – the Palais des Nations in Geneva – I stumbled upon the history of architect Le Corbusier’s involvement in the conception of the Palais. Le Corbusier, as we will see, was the victim of a double snub: first the hard-core modernist was weeded out in the prestigious architect competition the League arranged, as the competition Jury came to emphasize the traditional traits of a palace structure.

After a new round of competitions, following a major debacle about the building site, Le Corbusier was cheated again: The Jury’s preferred architect had been inspired by Le Corbusier’s drawings to a suspicious degree. As with so many other aspects of the League, however, the story continued into the postwar years, as Le Corbusier retrieved his honour by becoming one of the key architects behind the new United Nations building in New York.    

The importance of semantics

Since the time of the roman emperors, the term “palace” has been used to indicate the physical seat of power. As is often the case in Western history, the glory of the Roman Empire inspired following civilizations, and the term palatium, or palace, never lost its ideological charge. Instead, it became part of the vocabulary of every modern language, employed to indicate the physical location of power. A simple search on Google images for “palace”, displays how this term is linked with images of Greco-Roman architecture and monuments of power and prestige. It was the meaning and etymology of the word ‘palace’ that would cause so much trouble for the modernist architect Le Corbusier.

In its early days in Geneva, the League of Nations Secretariat were quartered at the Hôtel National. It was clear from the beginning that the hotel was ill-suited as an administrative building. When the Swiss authorities offered a site for a new conference hall, therefore, the League seized the opportunity: in 1924, the Assembly asked for a building which was to “perform fully and adequately the essential function and purposes of an Assembly Hall of the League of Nations”. [1] The League opted for an international competition, whose guidelines were written down by an international Jury, in order to clarify and emphasise the great ideological and symbolic importance of the construction of the first world parliament.

The Jury believed that “it was the idea of the League of Nations which had to inspire the construction of the building, and that it was from an understanding of the world based on brotherhood that the architectural realization had to be emanated”. [2] This idea seemed to crave modernity. A modernity expressed through a new architectural concept for the physical seat of power - which is why so many modernist architects took part in the competition with great enthusiasm.

Despite the fact that this was to be the headquarters of an organisation that sought to break with the past of secret diplomacy and fleeting alliances, the Jury, after having referred to the building as a Conference or Assembly Hall, decided, in the official guidance for the competition, to opt for the history-laden term “the Palace”. [3]

_{The Signing of the Treaty of Peace at Versailles - June 28th 1919}

Through this semantic alteration, the Jury implicitly foresaw the League headquarters as a site of traditional power and diplomacy, akin to the Palace of Versailles – where the League was born. The troubled case of the exclusion of the modernist architect Le Corbusier would lay the traditionalist inclination of the Jury bare.

Le Corbusier case 

By the deadline of the competition, January 1926, 377 different projects had reached Geneva. Due to the big response, and differing views within the Jury, the verdict was not an easy one. To this came the fact that an overwhelming majority of the projects chose to ignore the rules set up by the Jury. Most projects, for instance, exceeded the budget limit of 13 million francs stipulated by the Jury; some of them reaching estimates of 50 million francs. 

Ultimately, therefore, the final decision was to recommend, not a single winner, but 27 different ones – a decision that was heavily criticised. The Jury was accused of having neglected their own budget limits, nominating projects estimated to cost more than 13.000.000 francs, and also to have ignored the fundamental premise of the competition by nominating 27 different ‘winners’. Thus, a Committee of Five, consisting of seasoned diplomats, was nominated to resolve the impasse.  Unsurprisingly, they came out in favour of the Jury, considering that the path chosen had been inevitable, since none of the projects respected the conditions of the competition.

This position was, however, soon questioned by part of the specialized public opinion, which started gathering around one project that scrupulously respected the regulation. The architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret – one of the 27 winners – had, as it turned out, presented a project which fulfilled all the criteria of the competition, with an estimated expenditure of 12.500.000 million francs.