By March 1950, Liebes's studio completed custom handwoven textiles for the United Nations Headquarters interiors in New York City.
By March 1950, Dorothy Liebes's New York studio had completed custom handwoven textile commissions for the interiors of the newly constructed United Nations Headquarters in New York City. This project placed her work at the center of one of the most symbolically important architectural sites of the postwar era—a building meant to represent international cooperation, modernity, and hope following the devastation of the Second World War.
Her contribution to the UN Headquarters interiors reflected the high esteem in which she was held by the architectural establishment, as the building's design committee included some of the era's most celebrated architects. Liebes's textiles—known for their luminous color combinations and innovative blending of natural and synthetic fibers—brought warmth and texture to the otherwise severe modernist glass-and-steel aesthetic of the complex.
This commission remains one of the most historically resonant of her career, given the UN's enduring symbolic role in global diplomacy. It also exemplified how thoroughly her work had penetrated the highest echelons of institutional and governmental design by mid-century, cementing her legacy not just as a designer of private residences and department stores but as a shaper of the visual identity of global political spaces.