Place des Nations
Monumental wooden chair sculpture with a broken leg, protesting landmines and cluster bombs.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Place des Nations in Geneva starts with the giant wooden chair standing guard outside the United Nations, twelve metres of Douglas fir with three solid legs and a jagged stump where the fourth should be. It traces the monument back to October nineteen ninety-six, when Belgian aid worker Paul Vermeulen of Handicap International asked sculptor Daniel Berset for something no diplomat could ignore, and follows carpenter Louis Genève and engineer Thomas Büchi as they worked out how a broken chair could stand at all. Stand beneath the gap where that fourth leg should meet the ground and take in a monument built around an absence.
This audio guide was created using AI.