Documents

This brochure is intended for members of the international community who are based in Switzerland as well as anyone interested in Switzerland's activities as a host state. By combining a brief history with interesting facts, it reveals how Switzerland's ambitious and visionary host-state policy enabled it to become the foremost centre of global governance and international cooperation. 

For more than a year the photographer Christian Lutz has been observing Geneva's 'ballet' of international cooperation. Through his eyes, we catch a rare glimpse of the rich diversity of people, meetings and relationships and the myriad of ways they collaborate. Under-secretaries, interns, ambassadors, meteorologists, nutritionists, physicists... Lutz has observed them all.

How did Geneva acquire its international renown? Who put this small Swiss city on the world map? When and why did this happen? Was it planned, or did it happen by chance? With this book, Joëlle Kuntz takes a concise and irreverent look at a story that is familiar yet seldom told: the emergence of Geneva as an international city.

This book retraces the various stages leading to the construction of the buildings that make up the city's international quarter today. The turbulent history of office architecture writ large is embedded in the canton's small territory, featuring, from the start, a quarrel about modernity, instigated by Le Corbusier over the Palais des Nations. From the austere stone building inaugurated in 1926 for the International Labour Organisation to the glass bubbles occupied by the Maison de la Paix since 2014, this architectural journey is recounted for the firt time here.