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What fragrance is associated in your mind with summer holidays?
The smell of the oceans – hard to describe since water has no odour. But for me there is a distinct and soothing aroma. It must be the mixture of seaweed and sea life carried into the beach by the waves that have skimmed off bits and pieces and churned them into a fresh fragrance.
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October 2015
For the last 30 years, the Right Livelihood Award has been given to people who have demonstrated « outstanding vision and work on behalf of our planet and its people ».
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On 29 November 2015 at the Victoria Hall, Antoine Marguier will conduct the United Nations Orchestra and the invited cellist Camille Thomas. The concert will focus on Romantic music and composers Piotr Illitch Tchaïkovsky and Robert Schumann. Interview with this conductor who is also co-founder and art director at the United Nations Orchestra.
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A valid email address consists of an email prefix and an email domain, both in acceptable formats (abc@mail.com)
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Competing with Brussels to host the headquarters of the League of Nations after the First World War, Geneva played one of its strongest cards: the romantic beauty of its lakeside setting, facing Mont Blanc. Only the best would do for the Council of the League of Nations. The people of Geneva complied, though not without a tinge of regret. This first article describes the reasons and circumstances leading to the establishment of the international quarter in the district it occupies today.
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United Nations Archives at Geneva
By Joëlle Kuntz*
Translated by Viviane Lowe
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The imposing sandstone building by the lake known today as Palais Wilson, wich has served as the headquarters of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights since 1998, is the oft- revived corpse of an unlucky structure. Built between 1873 and 1875 by the Genevan architect Jacques-Elisée Goss (1839–1921), whose legacy includes the Geneva Opera, it was originally designed as a luxury hotel for wealthy Europeans touring the continent.
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This fourth article about the architecture of international organizations in Geneva examines the role of design competitions in the development of new architectural forms and building techniques. As of the 1960s, modernism had outgrown its early-twentieth-century timidity to become fully established. Le Corbusier’s protest over the rejection of his design for the Palace of Nations was instrumental in bringing about this change.
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This sixth article in the series on the architectural history of international organizations in Geneva considers the urban planning dilemma caused by the building of the Palace of Nations on the Ariana estate. A dilemma that was tackled, but never resolved, by several international architectural competitions occurring over the course of 50 years. A minimalist solution emerged only in 2000, after a final contest.
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This seventh article in the series on the architectural history of international organizations in Geneva focuses on the decision to locate the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the Place des Nations. It describes a first attempt to implement André Gutton’s proposal for the square, and the restrictions it imposed on both architects and users. Though more modest than originally planned, the ITU block and tower nonetheless contributed to the move toward modernism in Geneva’s international quarter.
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In a brochure presenting the new headquarters of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Alberto Camenzind, one of its three architects, explained that the urban landscape of his native Ticino is defined by its church steeples. Perched on a hill in the Morillons neighbourhood, the ILO would one day stand as “one of Geneva’s defining structures”, he added.(1) He was right.
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It may seem strange to devote a chapter of a book about the architectural history of Geneva's international quarter to the buildings of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — given the absence of architecture they represent. However, this absence itself is symptomatic of the ICRC’s moral dimension. One would expect that the world’s largest humanitarian organization could exist only in modest, even temporary quarters, since its mission is rooted in the ideal of a world without war.
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The cluster of buildings on the Place des Nations that house the activities of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) embodies a slice of Geneva’s architectural history. Between the building of a first, austere office block, designed by Pierre Braillard, in 1961 and the inauguration of a lavish new conference room in 2014, construction techniques and architectural tastes have undergone a radical shift.
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Meteorology is forward-looking by nature. Its time horizon is the next hour, the next day, a week, a month, or even several years from now – in a word, the future. The tyranny of the future gives meteorologists a knack for sensing which direction the wind is blowing.
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The six petals of azure glass, strung like a garland along the train tracks in Sécheron, are a manifesto for peace: the fluid, sinuous structures reflected in each other symbolise both the fragility and complexity of peace, and its supremacy over the banality of violence. Its owner, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), is in fact a product of the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, a peace as brief as it was fruitful.
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Seen from a distance or from above, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an aesthetically uninspiring conglomerate of office buildings, workshops, and laboratories. If not for the globe installed at its entrance in 2004, as a visitors’ centre, this industrial park-like complex, devoid of architectural interest, would go completely unnoticed. Like the International Committee of the Red Cross, CERN has always been built under pressure, with little concern for appearance.
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These lines were written as “International Geneva” prepares to celebrate its first century, which began in 1919 with the arrival of the ILO, the only one of all the international organizations created by the Treaty of Versailles to have survived until the present with its name and basic configuration intact. This Genevan century reads like a history of the world: ideas of how to keep the peace, methods to implement them, and organizations to do so, brought together in a single place, as if internationalism needed a port of call to spread across the world.