Assembly by Design

""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   ""Assembly by Design paints a detailed picture of how the UN staged, and later disseminated, the vision of liberal internationalism in the decades following the Second World War.""—SITE   ""Touloumi’s book is immensely well researched and annotated, valuable as history and as a theoretical examination of the physical and metaphysical ideation of world governance.""—Places Journal   ""The sheer depth of Touloumi’s archival wrangling and her synthesis of content across fields and languages in explaining the 20th century’s (still standing) Tower of Babel is impressive.""—Architectural Record   ""For architecture, interior design, international relations, and cultural studies scholars and enthusiasts, Assembly by Design is an essential read. It provides an accessible but richly detailed historical account of the UN’s headquarters and a compelling argument for considering how design, particularly interior design, shapes our collective experiences, both now and through their relationship with the past."" —The Plan Journal