Biography | Houlin Zhao — First Union Badge on This Square

People date Zhao from the secretary-general election.

The Union date is older.

In 1986 he joined the secretariat of the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee at ITU headquarters on Place des Nations in Geneva.

The committee was still known by its French acronym, CCITT.

From 1986 to 1998 he served as engineer and counsellor, first under CCITT and, after the 1993 reorganization, under the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau.

In 1989 he was named the CCITT coordinator for work with ISO, IEC and the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1.

He staffed the 9th CCITT Plenary Assembly in 1988 and the World Telecommunication Standardization Conferences of 1993 and 1996.

The tower that faces the square was already there.

André Bordigoni's pentagonal slab, finished in the early 1970s, rises fifteen storeys over Place des Nations.

The Montbrillant and Varembé wings later closed around it.

This is a workplace pin, not a residence.

The Union's postal address remains Place des Nations, 1211 Geneva 20.

In 1998 member states elected him Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau.

He held that elected post for two terms, 1999 to 2006, then two terms as Deputy Secretary-General from 2007 to 2014.

The 1986 staff badge is the first Geneva fact.

Everything later — Busan, Dubai, the title on the tower — sits on that hire.

A visitor can walk the square without entering the offices.

The glass and the pentagon are the public face of the agency that allocates radio spectrum, sets interconnection standards, and keeps the numbering plans that make a call leave one country and arrive in another.

Stand here for the year a ministry engineer became international staff, not for the year the nameplate changed.

Photo: ITU Tower, Geneva, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons