For more than 70 years, the 39-storey United Nations headquarters in New York has towered over Manhattan’s East River skyline. Built on land once owned by the Rockefeller family, the structure is a modernist monument to slivery political and architectural manipulations executed through a panel of big-name global architects from the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. They squabbled for several years before building the structure that serves as the home of UN bureaucrats and the General Assembly, an institution that now towers over global policy-making.
