Warning!

Everybody else was talking about the United Nations' new home in the U.S. (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), so why not architects? Last week gallerygoers at Manhattan's up-to-the-minute Museum of Modern Art were confronted with outsize placards: MUST WE REPEAT THE GENEVA FIASCO? On the wall were architectural drawings that had been entered in the international competition in 1927 for a Geneva palace for the old League of Nations. Above them was an ominous legend: "The Competition Failed. The Building Failed. The League Failed."

Presumably this was meant to imply that if the building had been more modern the League might never have foundered. Four arch-conservative architects had won the Geneva competition, pooled their resources to design the cumbersomely classic stone pile which was finally finished in 1938--when there was no longer much use for it. But the "rightful winners," according to the Museum, were Frenchmen Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, who had proposed a terraced glass-and-concrete palace in the strictest "functional" tradition. This time, urged the Museum, the UNO planners should "learn from Geneva and select an international jury of honest men, sensitive to the modern spirit in architecture."

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