Remembering Jean-Louis Cohen (1949–2023)

It is with immense sadness that we have learned of the death of Jean-Louis Cohen. He was an extraordinary historian and a uniquely gifted intellectual, critic, and institution builder, capable of understanding diverse cultures and situations wisely and with compassion. Jean-Louis was curious, engaged, political, funny, humble, generous with his expertise, and, most impressively, able to do many things at the same time without ever seeming busy. ?

“I like to share knowledge and I do not keep it for myself, for my books. I’m curious about other people.” Jean-Louis Cohen ?

Each of these qualities, and more yet to be discovered by future scholars, are evident in his archive, which he donated to the CCA in 2019. ?

Jean-Louis was integral to the CCA over many years and in several capacities: as curator, as Chair of the Collection, Research, and Programs Committee, and as a Board Member (since 1998). Our relationship began in the early 1990s, when he first discovered the CCA Collection. Impressed by its uniquely transnational holdings, he proposed an exhibition on American–Eastern European architecture, which developed from a conference he had organized with Hubert Damisch—who, along with Manfredo Tafuri, greatly influenced his thinking about architecture. Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960 opened in 1995 and exhibited how skyscrapers, industrial plants, and forms of mobility and efficiency that were rapidly transforming North America became symbols of the future to Europeans. ?

In 2011, the CCA opened Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War. It documented the extensive contribution of architecture to the Second World War between the bombings of Guernica in 1937 and Hiroshima in 1945, emphasizing how these events transformed existing architectural methods and construction technologies and embedded the logic of warfare into everyday modernism. His third project with the CCA, Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture, presented in 2019, continued to explore transnational relationships, a central focus of his research, by exposing the long-term and overlooked exchanges and influences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each of these exhibitions is accompanied by substantial publications that will support and inspire further research on these important topics. ?

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Working with Jean-Louis was an exceptional experience for the entire CCA team, a feeling he enthusiastically shared: “There is intellectual freedom [at the CCA] and the notion that your exhibition or publication can be born out of research and inspire research. This is exceptional and unique, and I’ve had three times the experience so far.” ?

Recently, we were planning a fourth project together on North Africa and co-curated with Samia Henni, to be realized in the coming years. Jean-Louis’s sudden passing leaves this and many other future projects that his vivid mind would have conceived up in the air. We are grateful and honoured to preserve his archive, which gives access to his personal papers, manuscripts, ideas, trials and errors, and generously invites future researchers to build on his legacy. ?

We will miss him deeply.

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