First trained as an architect, Jean-Louis Cohen subsequently earned a doctorate from
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In 1994 New York University’s
Institute of Fine Arts awarded him the architectural history chair created for Henry-
Russell Hitchcock and later occupied by Reyner Banham and Richard Pommer. Cohen
stopped teaching between 1979 and 1983 to expand and manage France’s government
research funds for architectural history, theory, and technology.
An articulate writer, popular lecturer, commentator for the French media, and leader of
research teams, Cohen has greatly contributed to expanding the knowledge and
understanding of Western architecture and urbanism in the first half of the 20th century.
His initial expertise on Soviet avant-garde architecture led him to study Le Corbusier’s
personal and theoretical effect in the Soviet Union as well as the career of French
modernist and pro-Soviet architect André Lurçat.
Cohen’s studies of cosmopolitan aspects of French architecture are also
groundbreaking; with Hartmut Frank he directed a team that compared policies
implemented by the Germans in Alsace-Lorraine in 1940–44 and by the French in the
Baden and Saar regions in 1945–50. In addition he has analyzed the French infatuation
with Italian architecture in the 1970s. The Centre Georges Pompidou entrusted him with
the architecture section for its Paris-Moscow exhibit and named him scientific adviser for
the mammoth 1987 retrospective “L’Aventure Le Corbusier.” Although Cohen has
organized shows on behalf of the Pavilion de l’Arsenal and Les Années 30 for the Musée
des Monuments Français, his best-known curatorial endeavor remains “Scenes of the
World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960,” a
spectacular display of artifacts related to Europe’s fascination with American
architecture, organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The premise
of the exhibition, as Cohen defined it, was that European architects and engineers were
intrigued by the iron-and-steel structure that supported the classicizing facades of the
World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. The following decades witnessed an
ongoing interaction between European architectural practice and thinking and the
contemporary American profession as the skyscraper and mass production reshaped
urban environments.
Overall, Cohen’s intent has been to explore how the complementary, and at times
contradictory, social and aesthetic concepts of modernism, modernity, and modernization
have affected the built environment on an international scale and to place these currents
into a broader political and cultural context. Cohen has served on the editorial boards of Architectu re ,
Mouvement, Continuité, Cas abella, and Des ign Book Review. He sits on the boards of the Fondation Le Corbusier and the Canadian Centre
for Architecture and is the only non-American member of the Council for Architecture
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 520
and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1998 his visibility,
cosmopolitanism, sense of leadership, and organization, which are unparalleled among
French architectural historians and critics, led to his nomination by the minister of culture
as the head of the Institut Français d’Architecture and Musée des Monuments Français.
