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Looking Back at the Construction of the United Nations

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The General Assembly of the United Nations is meeting this week, and in honor of the occasion, we looked back through the photo archives of the Museum of the City of New York and the United Nations' own photo archives to find images of the United Nations complex's construction and early years?have a look in the gallery above. The project of designing the United Nations began in 1947, when designer Wallace K. Harrison led a group of international architects, advised by Le Corbusier, to come up with the plan for the organizations' buildings. (The Secretariat building, the complex's first, is the best-known.) In 1995, noted architect Robert A.M. Stern described the U.N. complex as "the long-awaited, triumphant realization of interwar-era Modernist architecture and urbanism." More recent U.N. building plans have been about as popular as the traffic generated in the neighborhood by the General Assembly.
· United Nations coverage [Curbed]