Landscapes of Justice: World Order and Media in the Nuremberg Trials, c. 1945

Olga Touloumi

During four short months in the summer of 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US Signal Corps, IBM, and landscape architect Dan Kiley established themselves in Nuremberg to prepare for the International Military Tribunals. In Courtroom 600 Kiley fused modern landscape design and juridical architecture, reifying functionalist principles against historicist forms and symbolic visual languages. The objective was the production of international criminal law as a transparent rational system that made possible the translation of evidentiary input into adjudicative output. This lecture will examine the role of architecture and space in the double articulation of international law: both as a system that aims to deliver justice and as a just and international order in and of itself.

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Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College. Her work focuses on the history of modern architecture and addresses questions of governmentality, internationalism, and media theory. Her book-in-progress examines spaces of global governance since the outbreak of World War II and the new ideas about publics, citizenship, and communication that they articulated. Her research has received support from Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings & Landscapes, Thresholds, among others.