Kathleen James-Chakraborty

From the Belgian Pavilion to the Belgian Friendship Building: A Remnant of New York’s 1939 World’s Fair

by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin

January 22, 2026 at 1 PM ET

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The Belgian Pavilion at the World’s Fair held in New York’s Flushing Meadow in1939 and again in 1940 was designed by a trio of prominent architects, VictorBourgeois, Léon Stynen, and Henry van de Velde, to exhibit modern Belgian architecture, artisanship, and design, as well as products and art from the Congo, thecountry’s largest colony. Originally designed in part to celebrate the support the UnitedStates had offered Belgium in World War II, following the German invasion of Belgium inMay 1940, it became a site at which continued support for the fate of the smallEuropean nation could be voiced. The earliest of the international designs to besubmitted to the fair’s authorities for approval, the building was widely admired, not leastfor the carillon housed in its belltower, the spectacular diamonds on display inside, andthe relatively permanent appearance of a structure clad in Belgian tile and slate ratherthan in whitewashed stucco, as was more common throughout the rest of the exhibit.The war left the Belgian government in exile unable to afford to disassemble a pavilionthat had been constructed by Belgian workers out of imported materials to avoid payingfor local union labor. Jan-Albert Goris, a Belgian civil servant, found a solution when heproposed to present it as a “gift” to an American college or university who would coverthese costs. As a result, it was reassembled on the grounds of Virginia UnionUniversity, a historically Black campus in Richmond, Virginia, where the bell towerbecame a memorial to Robert L. Vann, an alumnus who had edited the PittsburghCourier, a leading African American weekly newspaper. Here a building that stillfeatured bas reliefs intended to celebrate Belgium’s “civilizing” mission in the Congoserved to offer improved educational facilities to instigators of the local Civil Rightsmovement.

A historian of modern architecture, Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been Professor of Art History at UCD since 2007. A graduate of Yale, James-Chakraborty earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of California Berkeley, where she reached the rank of full professor, at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was a Mercator guest professor, and at the Yale School of Architecture, where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History. In 2019 she received the Gold Medal in the Humanities from the Royal Irish Academy. James-Chakrabortty's books include Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, 1997), German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge, 2000) Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014; Guangxi, 2017), and Modernism as Memory; Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018). She is the editor of India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016) and Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006). Her articles have appeared in German Politics and Society, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and New German Critique. She has contributed to the catalogues of exhibitions held at the Barbican (London), Folkwang Museum (Essen), the German Architectural Museum (Frankfurt), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Architecture Biennale (Venice), as well as more than a dozen edited books. In April 2021 she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant, and during the 2021-22 academic year she held an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..