Europe Builds: The Architecture of a Marshall Plan Exhibition as a Performance of Global Governance

Abstract

Abstract Europe Builds was a mobile exhibition designed by the Visual Information Unit (VIU) of the Economic Cooperation Administration, which administered the Marshall Plan (MP), visiting seventeen cities throughout western Europe in 1950. The US conceived of the MP to shape western European nations into dependable allies. Often seen as a unilateral application of US hegemony, this paper claims that it was an example of multilateral global governance. The VIU’s multinational designers embodied the multilateralism they promoted, and the exhibition they designed combined modern aesthetic with circus pomp to communicate the benefits of European integration. Beyond reading the exhibition’s content, this paper reads the architecture of exhibition, organising it into three tropes: mobility, lightness, and ingenuity, which related to separate aspects of the MP. Beyond representing European integration, the exhibition performed it. Its users absorbed the lessons of the MP and through their participation thus, consenting to be governed.