Provisional permanence: The architecture of NATO’s successive seats

Over the course of the twentieth century, national regimes have increasingly become subordinate to international or intergovernmental organizations. The seats of such bodies have always given rise to high architectural expectations for they play an important role in their self-legitimation; indeed, they visually associate the organization with legitimate and noble pursuits and values such as peace, cooperation and solidarity. More often than not, however, this longing for solemnity and splendour is tempered by the need to house a gigantic bureaucratic machinery or the imperative to proceed quickly. Hence, there is an often ill-resolved tension between representation and efficiency; aspirational statements and political reality; and between intended meaning and public or professional reception. This chapter examines how such oppositions manifested themselves in the successive headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), one of the most prominent international bodies to date. As NATO historian Ian Q.R. Thomas has observed, in the context of the Cold War, words and metaphors were crucial weapons and rhetoric always formed a substantial factor in NATO’s internal cohesion, as a mechanism or instrument of unity. Indeed, throughout its history, a bewildering array of divergent and often conflicting ‘conceptions’ of the Alliance has co-existed: a vehicle for Atlantic Partnership, a linchpin of containment, an agent of U.S. leadership (or hegemony) in Europe, a force for human rights, etc. In this chapter, we examine if, at all, architecture – in its capacity of materializing concepts, communicating ideas and fostering identities through built form – has had a role to play in this permanent re-conceptualization of NATO. To this effect, we examine the successive seats the alliance occupied in London, Paris and Brussels respectively, and look at them from a triple viewpoint: (1) Temporal: how do the various seats speak to the future the organization held for itself at that moment? Did the construction of a new seat mark or engender a ‘new beginning’ or a change of course and, if so, how was this expressed in architectural terms – both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word, i.e., through a new building or an alternative structure of the organization? (2) Geographical and cultural: given its almost nomadic character during the first 20 years of its existence, we ask how the move from country to country symbolized or affected the reimagining of the organization and the architectural expression of its seat; (3) Finally, we also address the recurrent tension between intended and received meaning in built form: how were the intended symbolism or architectural metaphors (if any) in the various NATO seats interpreted in the professional and popular press? By doing so, we intend to show how the buildings used and produced by international organizations not only reflect their evolution but may also contribute to shaping their (visual) identities and culture of consultation.