Jean-Louis Cohen is an architect and historian. Jean-Louis Cohen holds a doctorate in art history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and headed the architectural research program of the French Ministry of Public Works (1979-1983), before taking up a research chair at the Paris-Villemin School of Architecture (1983-1996), then the History of Cities chair at the Institut français d'urbanisme at the University of Paris-VIII (1996-2005). In 1994, he was appointed Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. In 1997, the French Ministry of Culture entrusted him with the creation of the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, where he directed the Institut français d'architecture and the Musée des monuments français until 2003. He was visiting professor at the Collège de France from 2014 to 2021.
His research activity has focused on twentieth-century architecture and urbanism . He has studied the architectural cultures of Russia and Germany, the colonial situations of Morocco and Algeria, architecture during the Second World War, and has devoted himself to interpreting the work of Le Corbusier and the history of urban planning in Paris. A central question in his work is that of cultural transfers in architecture and the urban landscape, approached through relations between Italy, Germany and France, and recurrently through interactions between Russia and the West.
His more than forty published works include Frank Gehry. Catalog Raisonné of the Drawings. Vol. 1, 1954-1978 (2020) ; Construire un nouveau Nouveau Monde, l'amerikanizm dans l'architecture russe (2020) ; Le Corbusier : an Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013) ; Interférences / Interferenzen : architecture, Allemagne, France 1800-2000 (2013, with Hartmut Frank) ; L'architecture au futur depuis 1889 (2012) ; Architecture en uniforme (2011) ; Casablanca, mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine (1998, with Monique Eleb).
He has designed a number of exhibitions, including Le Corbusier, an Atlas of Modern Landscapes at MoMA in New York (2013) ; Scenes from Future Life, Architecture in Uniform and Building a New New World, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (1995, 2011 and 2019) ; Interférences, at the MAMC in Strasbourg (2013) and Une architecture de l'engagement : l'AUA (1960-1985), at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine (2016). In 2014, he curated the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Jean-Louis Cohen passed away on August 7 2023.
