Der Palais des Nations. Ein Heim für das World Brain

»Who will build for the League of Nations? Will it be the ghosts of the past or will the building be erected out of the spirit of the present? It looks as if the ghosts have won and a real building catastrophe [»Baukatastrophe«] is on the rise.« The architectural critic Siegfried Giedion was rather harsh in his evaluation of the planned Palais de la Société des Nations. Instead of Le Corbusier’s hypermondernistic administrative machine – as one might call his proposal in relation to his idea of a living machine – the League of Nations decided in Giedion’s view to build »theatre coulisses« from long gone times. The problem was for Giedion that the monumental architecture of the proposals – except from the one of Le Corbusier – would not guarantee the administrative work of the secretariat of the League of Nations without frictions

Siegfried Giedion, Wer baut das Völkerbundgebäude? Teure Stilarchitektur – neuzeitliche, zweckgemäße Lösungen, in: Bauwelt 44 (1927), S. 1093–11010.

But nonetheless, the idea of being an efficient bureaucracy and a global »clearing house« of information became one of the leading factors of the League of Nations’ image production. This paper examines how this image was created, which messages and media were used to market the idea of an efficient bureaucracy world-wide and which administrative cultures were presented as laudable signs of a peaceful and well-organized future.