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ASSEMBLY BY DESIGN event at Brief Histories with Olga Touloumi
December 14, 2024 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST
Olga Touloumi will join Brief Histories on Saturday, December 14 for a talk and moderated discussion on her new book Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior, at 4:00 p.m. EST.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is not required, but space is limited.
Assembly by Design examines the politics and aesthetics of the iconic United Nations headquarters in New York City, exploring how architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design to create a new type of public space: the global interior. Demonstrating how this space leveraged media to help the UN communicate with the world, Olga Touloumi shows how it defined political assembly both inside and outside the UN headquarters.
“How to put the world in one place? Olga Touloumi’s rich case study, full of archival surprises and telling images, shows us some fascinatingly brilliant and tortured answers to that question. Despite rumors, space in an electronic age hasn’t vanished, and its form matters profoundly. You’ll never think about the public sphere, sound, or architecture in the same way again.”—John Durham Peters, Yale University
“Assembly by Design is an exacting examination of the ways in which the United Nations’ participation in twentieth-century entanglements of nationalism and internationalism, colonialism and decolonization, have been profoundly shaped by the materials and ideologies of design. With a timely and revelatory analysis of the mediatic space of the UN that turns attention from the global village to the global interior, this book forcefully proves the consequentiality of design.”—Timothy Hyde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
