Take me to the United Nations,’ Cary Grant’s character Roger Thornhill tells his taxi driver in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest. ‘The General Assembly building.’
The office block he enters soon after is a beacon of the future. Curved white balconies glide across a vast foyer, occupied by a glamorous community of international cosmopolitans. Visitors to the UN’s New York headquarters today, however, tend to instead observe faded 1950s grandeur. ‘The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind [the] speaker at UN always bothered me,’ future US president Donald Trump pronounced in 2012. ‘I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.’1
