From Slab to Y

For two years U.N.'s poor relationship, UNESCO, has been trying without much success to build itself a permanent home in Paris. Still cramped into two converted hotels, UNESCO has twice drawn up plans, only to have them fail. The most recent attempt, by France's Bernard Zehr-fuss, Italy's Pier Nervi and the U.S.'s Marcel Breuer, was for a tall, slab-sided structure to be built near the Bois de Boulogne (TIME, Oct. 13). Paris' scornful verdict: "Notre Dame of the Radiators." Last week UNESCO proposed another solution to the problem of a modern building in an ancient city.

After countless sketches, Designers Zehrfuss, Nervi and Breuer had hit on an unusual, Y-shaped Secretariat, gracefully modern yet low enough (seven stories) to fit into a new site near the Eiffel Tower without overshadowing the classical architecture of neighboring buildings. The new plan calls for a building resting lightly on stiltlike pilotis. Within the Y is space for UNESCO's 1,200 workers, each one with a window on Paris; there will be small conference rooms, a bank, workshops, two restaurants, doctors' offices and libraries. On the ground, the architects plan a mosaic-tiled pool, a delegates' patio, and off to one side a squat conference building with a large auditorium and a radical, accordion-pleated roof so strong that it needs only one line of interior pillars for support.

Paris greeted the new plan with cheers, predicted early approval by city officials. A few diehard conservatives still grumbled, but most people liked the clean modernism and the low bow to Paris' past. Wrote Critic Andre Siegfried in Le Figaro: "That which thinking Parisians demand is that their city, without refusing to be of its own century, not renounce [its right to] remain Paris. Delicate problem. Delicate reconciliation." Echoed the left-wing Combat: "Very seductive . . . They have succeeded perfectly."

Next, and possibly the toughest step for purse-poor UNESCO: getting the general conference of member nations to approve the plan at the meeting this July, vote the $7,000,000 necessary to build the permanent home.

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