The UAE’s Permanent Mission to the UN Flagship by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Takes Home a Best of Year Award

In 2014, SOM won a competition to design a new flagship home for the UAE’s Permanent Mission to the UN. The brief called for an aspirational design requiring architectural diplomacy: elegance without ostentation and an ethos of dignity, calm, grace, and gravity. Design partner Chris Cooper and his team devised a facade of thin Indiana limestone mullions that climb to the top of the 10-story, 75,000-square-foot building. Evoking the tapered spines of palm leaves, the understated exterior expresses the decorum of a building centered around the square, the cube, and symmetry. Just beyond the foyer, visitors step into a surprise: a two-story burst of space with a cliff of stairs that zigzag upward like a switchback version of ancient Greek propylaea. Recalling an Emirati courtyard, this welcoming hall with a 40-foot ceiling finished in hand-gilded metal leaf transposes traditional Arab attitudes of hospitality to East Midtown. A tall box of dark limestone nested within a larger, taller box of white marble, the hall initiates the interior’s sense of ceremonial progression. Functionally, it leads to event spaces on the second floor, but thematically it establishes the reductive palette of rich, beautifully crafted stone and wood on the floors above, and the geometric simplicity throughout.

Dave Burk/Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: chris cooper; tj gottesdiener; emily mottolese; charles harris; shubhra singhal; nathaniel broughton; oana bunea-velea; xian chi; norbert schlotter; ece calguner erzan; sepideh khazaei; jackie moran; angela caviezel; lauren kosson; fiona mccarthy; sarah hatch; cynthia mirbach.