8. There’s a piece of the UN’s curtain wall on view
Amid all the blockbuster art, it would be easy to miss a rather unassuming yet important piece of architecture. A piece of the curtain wall from the United Nations Secretariat building designed by the UN’s Board of Design, which included illustrious architects Wallace K. Harrison, Max Abramovitz, Oscar Niemeyer, and Le Corbusier, between 1947 and 1952, stands in Gallery 417. It was given to The MoMA by the United Nations.
“What’s fascinating about this object is it’s one of the first façades that was part of a fully glazed glass façade. Architects have imagined and fantasized for a long time how to create a fully glass enclosed building and the United Nations Secretariat was one of the first buildings that actually materialized this idea,” Evangelos Kotsioris, curatorial assistant in The MoMA’s department of Architecture and Design, says in a video. Though the UN Secretariat building isn’t one of New York’s tallest skyscrapers, it became the archetype for the city’s modern glass-clad buildings, so it’s fitting that The MoMA preserves and honors this piece of architectural history.
