When the editors of the Avery Review began to discuss organizing a tribute following the recent, untimely death of Jean-Louis Cohen, we did not quite know what we were getting into. We had of course read his work in our seminars; a few of us had seen him lecturing or contributing in other ways to the intellectual and curatorial world of architecture. Everyone seemed to have at least one, if not several, friends who had worked with Jean-Louis, but none of us had done so personally. It was only as we began sketching his network—guided by our collaborator, Christina Crawford, who was Jean-Louis’s student and, later, co-editor on a volume coming out this fall—that we began to glimpse the immensity of Jean-Louis’s influence, both personal and intellectual, on the field.
The contributors below include a number of Jean-Louis’s former advisees, colleagues, and interlocutors. They have been kind enough to offer individual memories of their experiences, including class trips, seminars, conferences, advising meetings, and even distinctive turns of phrase. Those whom we have asked to contribute reflect the lines of intellectual exchange and sympathy we find ourselves in—which skew, inevitably, toward New York City, where we are based and where Jean-Louis taught for almost three decades at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. It is a necessarily partial and constrained group of voices. Jean-Louis, by contrast, was never constrained; he was voracious and encyclopedic in his interests, his languages, and his generosity toward his fellow travelers. The collection of short reflections that follows is therefore inadequate—other tributes have already been organized and we are sure many more will follow in the coming months and years—but it is that very inadequacy that serves as one testament to his legacy.
—the Avery Review
Anna Kats
Jean-Louis seemed to know everything and everyone (since childhood, it frequently turned out), to have read it all (in the original), and to have remembered every instance (in preternatural detail). For example: during a visit to the home of João Batista Vilanova Artigas in the 1980s, Jean-Louis had mentally inventoried the bookshelves. Some forty years later, in a routine advising meeting with me, he recited offhand the full citations, in Russian, for several titles of High Stalinist architectural theory as he had seen them in the Paulista architect’s library. His tone was casual, quietly bemused. My curiosity was piqued but, he remarked, I’d be hard-pressed to find any of these in North America. The following week he brought me a book—I opened it to find photo plates, full paragraphs, individual clauses variously cut out. To my perplexed reaction he replied that this had been Kopp’s copy. He was referring to Anatole Kopp, his own teacher. Take it, he directed, again with a mirthful nonchalance that cut the specter of nostalgia from our exchange but left its gravity unspoken and thus intact.
Sylvia Lavin
It was hard to argue with Jean-Louis. Not just because he knew everything about so much but also because he was too elegant a Frenchman, too generous a colleague, and too sophisticated an institutional strategist to ever leave his flank exposed. Even when delivering bad news, he did so as a diplomat: he advised me not to do a dissertation on the Cité Industrielle because, he told me, he feared the French would never allow an American full access to the archive. But I am perversely glad to report that, in the months before his utterly tragic death, after forty years of friendship, he and I finally got entangled in an argument. “Finally” because dispute is essential to the forms of engagement that, in retrospect, seem to be what bonded us and that are derived from the conditions of being atheist Jewish intellectuals in a culture of assimilation. The argument was precisely about archives and a form of assimilation for which he and I were jointly responsible as members of the committee that structures the incorporation of materials into the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. At issue was where and whether to draw boundaries between personal and professional/scholarly materials, and how to manage the inevitable shaping of the historical record that occurs at critical moments of inclusion and exclusion, sometimes triggered by a subject’s self-positioning and at other times by institutional positioning. I do not regret arguing with Jean-Louis about this topic, or that the debate is permanently inscribed in the CCA’s institutional archive, because it mirrors the culture of argumentation that he and I shared, precisely both personally and professionally. That we didn’t have time to finish the argument is profoundly to be regretted: within that debate lies a thorny question troubling historical practice today, and it requires the deft sensitivities that uniquely characterized Jean-Louis.
Christina E. Crawford
Jean-Louis loved the thrill of the archival hunt. We were in Ann Arbor to hammer out the details of what would become the “Detroit-Moscow-Detroit” symposium, and our friend and collaborator Claire Zimmerman promised a surprise for our visit at the Bentley Historical Library. When the archivist gingerly placed a thick leather-bound scrapbook embossed with gold Cyrillic characters on the table, Jean-Louis was giddy. He leaned over it, taking cellphone photos of the 1929 construction administration record of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory project and talking through, as he clicked, which of these photographs would sing in publication. Because his mind was also a deep archive, he (and probably only he) could confirm when one of his many, many mentees had unearthed something unique like this scrapbook. Let’s just say that when, as a doctoral candidate, I received an excited email from Jean-Louis about a memo I cited by some obscure Soviet oil administrator from the Azerbaijani archives, it registered as his highest praise. It kept me going.
The research and preoccupations of so many of us became part of his mental archive, thanks to his indefatigable capacity for mentorship. If I close my eyes, I can conjure a map that plots the architectural and urban projects, archives and exhibition halls, seasoned scholars and students, design practitioners and curators who are all connected by the faint lines of Jean-Louis’s peripatetic movements. In these sad days after learning of his death, I have wanted nothing more than to share memories of him with the people whose friendship I trace back to a Jean-Louis introduction. The many who were lucky to enjoy his warm and generous support—dots on his map, contributors to a collective archive of heterogeneous architectural scholarship—are, finally, his legacy.
Barry Bergdoll
Jean-Louis Cohen was everywhere in the world, but always right there when you needed him. In 2007, my first morning as newly appointed Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA began with an urgent email demanding precise plans for the (now dismantled) architecture gallery due for reinstallation in four weeks and again in six months. Panicked, I phoned Jean-Louis (was he in Paris? or at NYU? or at an airport?) to query him again about the images he had shown me of an arresting installation he had done in Moscow of Richard Pare’s large-scale photographs of Soviet avant-garde architecture. Could we restage and expand it for MoMA? Could we do it in a few months’ time? Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture 1922–1932 opened that July based on my concept of pairing Pare’s images of the current state of an inventory of famous and lesser-known buildings alongside period photographs of the same structures in Soviet periodicals and books. The idea was possible to pull off only because two amazing collections of Soviet architectural materials were at hand: that of Stephen Garmey, a graduate of GSAPP, and that, of course, of Professor Cohen. The show captivated visitors and the New York Times and led to a symposium in which the children of both the architect and the commissioner of Sergei Ginsburg’s renowned Narkomfin Building—both of whom Jean-Louis knew!—met for the first time and discussed that building’s complex conception and fate. The proceedings became an issue of Columbia’s Future Anterior (Summer 2008). A phone call to Jean-Louis had produced an exhibition, symposium, and journal. All of these are points of reference in the ever-expanding understanding of Soviet architectural experimentation, which was one of the many lifelong passions of the most vibrant, generous, and expansive architectural historian, and the dearest of friends to so many architectural historians.
Markus Lähteenmäki
He arrived in Helsinki in June 2023, as ever straight from opening one major museum show, in Portugal, soon on his way to hang another in China. I had invited him to deliver the keynote of the EAHN thematic conference “States in Between: Architecture and Empire in East Europe and North Eurasia,” framed as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022. At that time, he had immediately activated his network to support displaced scholars while also seeking to elucidate the broader cultural meanings of the war as well as the significance of Ukraine as a culture and a nation.
At the conference, he listened through every session, sitting in the front, taking notes and speaking out, pushing back toward a bigger picture, or pulling in to a detail. In his closing keynote he did the same: he provided context for architecture, coloniality, and modernity with a discussion of Algeria and Morocco and highlighted objects that have fallen into the blind spots of the historiographies of Soviet architecture. Placing himself in the story—we saw pictures of his travels across the Soviet Union since the 1970s—he unraveled the spatial and political hierarchies of the history of twentieth-century architecture, reevaluating the canons he himself had been instrumental in forging.
The conference program featured a typo. The title of his lecture read “translational” instead of the intended “transnational.” Opening his lecture by scolding me for the mistake, he admitted it was, in fact, a more precise description of his ambition. Indeed, he was the embodiment of both concepts: a cultural translator who, as a polyglot, would often act as an actual interpreter in the absence of one, but who could also build bridges across time and space, concepts and people. His modus operandi was always to stand one’s ground while genuinely listening, always ready to reconsider. This is what made him a great advisor and educator, relevant across decades, disciplines, and geographies, and also beyond academia.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
L’esprit d’escalier is an expression he taught me, which describes the moment you descend the stair and realize all the things you should have said. No meeting in those early days at the Institute of Fine Arts ended without my internal conversation in the stairwell. He was a demanding reader of footnotes (the locus of rigor) and gritty in his teaching (“This is how you make a PowerPoint” and “Sometimes the blurry image is the history”), but his was a walking pedagogy. “Know the city with your feet”—the practice he took to Barcelona, Casablanca, Chandigarh, Moscow—which I took to the Dadaab refugee camps, for a book I will never put into his hands. Days after a visit to the replica of the Barcelona pavilion in 2008, I landed in the passenger seat with him driving down the coast to Sitges, the beginning of years of conversation: about Somalia, the architecture of camps, and other concerns that found their way into my dissertation. I thought I might teach him what I learned at the Ethiopia-Somalia border—he only knew North Africa, after all—only to hear of his travels through Hargeisa, Jigjiga, and Dire Dawa, landscapes and timescapes that marked us both. His embodied practice extended to figures: the material sensitivities cultivated by Mies, the mason’s son, in a childhood in Aachen cathedral, or Le Corbusier, the gourmand, in gorging on Mughlai cuisine in India. For him, these architects were people: with stories, experiences, and habits.
His interventions, too, built on experience. The study of Soviet adventures in architecture grew from a childhood in communist summer camps in Russia (where he learned one of several languages he spoke with ease). Wooden boats he sailed in the Jardin du Luxembourg’s Grand Bassin led to a lifelong fascination with science, technology, aviation, spaceflight—an obsession I happened upon one evening, as he and my partner Asif expounded on rockets (!), leading them to years of trading archives and memories with each other. In a quiet conversation in 2011, we acknowledged our mutual devastating privilege, after my recent visit to Dadaab and his to Auschwitz, where he found the most personal of archival documents. As his student, I assisted his courses and symposia, researched The Future of Architecture Since 1889 and Architecture in Uniform, and learned the habits of the scholar: how to arrange the images into a narrative, how to read the archive, when to deduce and when to induce. I most cherish the sharing. The breakfast he made in the Silver Towers apartment the day after my disastrous qualifying exams, his puns digging the laughter out of my tears. Humble cheer at an exhibition opening, whether in Venice or New York, as if it were his first. Slipping into the chair beside me at Avery Library, always in the trenches, writing next week’s course lecture. Children hovering over every conversation—always asking about mine, and such a proud father and grandfather to his. Mathilde et Vera, vous êtes très chères. I miss you, Jean-Louis, and thank you, always.
Larissa Guimarães
With the briefest revisions and comments, Jean-Louis demonstrated that history can only be comprehensive when it admits its own limitations. He was kind enough to discuss with me an article for which I could not find a proper translation of the Portuguese word época, first trying, and failing, with the English word “epoch.” He suggested the original word, along with a complement sentence explaining the lack of an appropriate correlate. We ended this discussion with farewells in Portuguese, which was always how I found out he spoke yet another language. While his skilled fluency in a number of languages provided these small edits, it also extended to all of his writing. His discussion of the Centrosoyuz in the book on Corbusier and the USSR is bound to hold the most complementary sentence in architectural history: “Of course, you can add a sentence to explain the exceptions.”
Obrigada, Jean-Louis. Many of your students and colleagues will feel saudade—the Portuguese word for the feeling of missing something or someone.
Maristella Casciato
“Bonjour Jean-Louis.”
“Ciao, stella maris.”
A plain mode to recall the morning greetings Jean-Louis and I exchanged at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, just before he plunged into the boxes, the folders, the files, the drawings’ tubes that contained Frank Gehry’s papers.
Following the GRI’s acquisition of the LA-based architect’s archives, we began a full-speed processing of these documents in the spring of 2018 to support Cohen’s gargantuan project: a catalogue raisonné of Gehry’s sketches.
At the time of his sudden death, he had completed the text and was sorting the illustrations of the second volume; concurrently, he was researching and writing the third volume.
Jean-Louis Cohen belonged to the first cohort of the GRI Scholar Program in the fall of 1985 under the theme of “Aesthetic Experience and Affinities among the Arts.” He never stopped experimenting with that subject. His lengthy friendship with Gehry, now crystallized in the structure of the catalogue raisonné project, was the response to a mantra the two men had uncompromisingly shared: Architecture is by nature a form of Art.
Cohen’s passion for archival research and his enduring pursuit of details made him a legendary figure among the scholars populating the GRI Special Collections. He personally browsed through thousands of boxes, took snapshots as memory aids, included catalogue numbers in Excel sheets, measured out drawings, before dedicating many evenings to one-on-one conversations with Gehry, favoring the assemblage of a second-tier repertoire of processes and ideas.
Expressing the project’s essence, Cohen wrote in the introduction to Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings, whose first volume debuted in 2020: “The term ‘catalogue raisonné’ denoted a systematic collection of works… In this case, it does not imply the ultimate work—a full project or finished building—but meta-works, whose continuity conveys the research that brought forward the full project or finished building… It goes without saying that my frequent encounters with Frank Gehry since 1981, and his friendship, have provided an invaluable resource for the ideas expressed herein.”
Jean-Louis, your warm presence and gentle smile will be missed.
Da Hyung Jeong
Remembering my Doktorvater’s magnanimity fills me with emotion. Jean-Louis offered crucial advice at crucial moments as I navigated the challenges of conducting research on the former Soviet Union, whether it be access to archives or confrontation with the imperialist underpinnings of Soviet and, by extension, Russian culture. He deemed it all-important to base one’s work on rigorous archival research, but he would always remind me of the dangers of fetishizing archives: of regarding them as an infallible guarantee of historical truth. Jean-Louis once told me that history writing is less about dwelling in the past than it is about confronting the present, and I have allowed this spirit to be the foundation of my own inquiry into the constantly shifting meaning of Soviet architecture. Just over a year ago, he pointed out “the continuity between the USSR for which Putin maintains a certain nostalgia and the new empire that he is trying to build.”
Last autumn, I was sifting through the historical records of the Institut de l’Environnement at the National Archives of France when I chanced upon correspondence between Jean-Louis and the architect Jean-Paul Lesterlin, dating from April 1975. In letters he wrote to the then-director of the Comité pour la Recherche et le Développement en Architecture (CORDA), the twenty-six-year-old Jean-Louis called for the institutionalization of what had been personal and occasional exchanges between French and Soviet architects, particularly those from the non-Russian republics. This awareness of and interest in the heterogeneity of the Soviet Union would be manifested again three years later, when Jean-Louis organized the exhibition L’espace urbain en URSS at the Centre Pompidou, which provided him with the opportunity to reflect on the architecture of the republics.
Evangelos Kotsioris
“Sometimes you have to get lost in the forest before you find yourself back on the right path.” Jean-Louis told me this just a few years ago, his comforting response to my frustration with trying to put together a challenging chapter of my dissertation. Even for a seasoned historian like him who seemed to effortlessly produce article after article and book after book, getting “lost in the forest” of the archive, he argued with a smirk, was one of the pleasures of writing about architecture.
It was a serendipitous detour that had led me to Jean-Louis in the first place. A few years earlier, before I started my PhD, I remember accidentally stumbling upon the red square cover of his 1987 Le Corbusier et la mystique de l’URSS, which chronicles the Swiss-French architect’s “courtship” with the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1936. In the book, Jean-Louis managed to expand what would have otherwise remained a footnote in the career of a canonical figure into a surprisingly hefty volume. Le Corbusier’s little-known trips to Moscow (in 1928, 1929, and 1930), in particular, were detailed with a riveting, almost minute-by-minute precision. Meticulously constructed out of thousands of archival finds, the book’s structure resembled an oversized tapestry patiently composed of countless carefully placed stitches.
Most unexpectedly, perhaps, Jean-Louis did not simply dwell on what Soviet architects had learned from their encounters with the “distant star” (la star lointaine) of European modernism. Instead, he revealed the great conceptual debt that Le Corbusier’s most impactful works—from La ville radieuse to the Unité d’habitation—owed to the Russian architectural avant-garde. What struck me in particular was Jean-Louis’s determined quest to map the transnational flow of ideas, a quality, I now realize, that later informed my own investigations into the interchanges between Soviet and American architectural and computing cultures during the Cold War. Though the “forest” of my own inquiry could often seem replete with false starts, mistaken trails, and wrong turns, I had Jean-Louis’s reassurance that this should all be part of the fun, and that the path out would eventually emerge in clear focus.
Patricia A. Morton
Jean-Louis Cohen had a transformative influence on my scholarship when he served as an informal advisor to me when I worked on my dissertation research in Paris. I had been introduced to Jean-Louis a year earlier, and he agreed to meet with me occasionally while I was in Paris. The research went very slowly at first; the sheer volume of sources on the 1931 Colonial Exposition so daunted me that I wasted precious research time trying to find the archives rather than working in them. My first meeting with Jean-Louis unnerved me. I was intimidated by his erudition and embarrassed that I had yet to do any real research. He greeted me with, “Quoi de neuf?” further alarming me because I had nothing new to tell. He listened to my garbled excuses patiently and pointed out that I could begin research at the municipal archives in Paris rather than waiting until I could travel to Aix-en-Provence where the bulk of the materials were held. His kind advice helped me make progress through the labyrinth of French archives. At that moment, we began a long conversation on global modern architecture, which led him to his study of Casablanca (with Monique Eleb) and led me to work on race and architecture. He was one of the few French scholars who were interested in postcolonial theory and engaged with critiques of Eurocentric histories of modernism. While his scholarship was important to my work, it was his graciousness and generosity that made him more than a mentor, but a precious friend and interlocutor.
Adrian Sudhalter
While our paths crossed professionally over the years—most recently in the context of an essay he agreed to write for a volume I was co-editing for MoMA (Engineer, Agitator, Constructor)—Jean-Louis Cohen’s greatest impact on me took place when I was a graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts in the late 1990s. At the time, he was fairly new to the IFA and simultaneously teaching at the Institut Français d’Urbanisme. He divided his time between New York and Paris. To manage this dual appointment, he compressed the seminar I took with him on Mies van der Rohe in fall 1997 into half the time: five weeks, not ten; two classes a week; and, instead of a series of student presentations, a single daylong marathon for the finale at midsemester. He may have done this regularly during that period, I don’t know. For me, the seminar was riveting. The compression made it feel intense, pressured, urgent. It contributed to the sense of common investment in the subject matter and a closeness among the students. It was a privilege to visit the Seagram Building and Philip Johnson’s Rockefeller Guest House, but even more to share so many consecutive hours with Jean-Louis. He treated his students like colleagues, like equals and professionals before we had proven ourselves or published anything of note. This, combined with his innate warmth and generosity, had an elevating, empowering effect. Everyone functioned at their best and the final papers were outstanding. Jean-Louis’s generosity was rare. I suspect that it can only exist in someone cognizant of their own intellectual limitlessness and thus able to make others feel that it might also be theirs.
Ariane Harrison
The idea, finally. (Jean-Louis might have whispered enfin under his breath.) We discussed the concept that gave structure to my dissertation on modernists’ experiments in industrial design. He extended his unflappable confidence and inexhaustible Rolodex to my pursuit of a Modernist story buried in the Thonet Archives. And there, I eventually found the bodies: photographs of bodies in flotation tanks from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1930s that pointed to the “scientificity of comfort.” The modernist creation of a pseudoscientific aesthetic gave these bodies—and the chaises longues that supported them—new audiences and markets. The dissertation took a long time, but the conversations with Jean-Louis, with his surgical pressure on any given assumption and his wry asides on the built environment, scaffolded the completed dissertation (enfin!) and, later, my architectural practice, Harrison Atelier, which aims to examine the technologies that connect human and nonhuman bodies to the constructed environment.
Our 2012 installation, Pharmacophore, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, drew on these concepts. A bemused expression crossed his face as Jean-Louis sat amid inflatables and blue-lit glazing in our installation, which extended the glow of Big Pharma into the street. Recently disbanded Merce Cunningham dancers performed within the rotating Storefront walls. We—designers, dancers, and the director of the Storefront, Eva Franch i Gilabert—wrapped the closing performance at Jean-Louis’s NYU apartment. Its walls, bearing numerous exhibition posters and drawings dedicated to him by Niemeyer, Chemetoff, and others, spoke to Jean-Louis’s vital presence and engagement in the making of the built environment. Our dialogue on scientificity continues to inform Harrison Atelier’s design approach, integrating material and nonhuman intelligences, a perspective now sharpened by a deep sense of loss of a mentor and advocate.
Ariela Katz
Remembering Jean-Louis, I could share anecdotes about his kind encouragement and witty repartee or enumerate his monumental accomplishments. Yet, as his assistant at GSAPP in the late 1980s, his doctoral student at NYU in the late 1990s–2000s and, finally, as his colleague and friend in New York and Paris, I am most deeply indebted to the contrasting but complementary personal and intellectual traits that made him a remarkable scholar and teacher.
On the one hand, there was his all-encompassing outlook. More than once, Jean-Louis, a fiercely secular European, jokingly referred to himself as a “wandering Jew.” In fact, his way of being in the world—like his way of thinking about architecture’s intertwining with culture and politics—embodied a kind of wide-ranging cosmopolitanism. He navigated between social situations, cultures, languages, and even disciplines with astounding ease. This seemed to me to emanate from a fundamental respect for human endeavors that stemmed as much from his political upbringing as from his boundless curiosity and charismatic sociability.
On the other hand, there was his sharply focused ability—a very French one, perhaps—to collect and manipulate enormous quantities of material and conceptual data. He could assemble masses of information into encyclopedic but nonetheless concise and often wry lectures, texts, and exhibitions. He used this method, both narrowly detail-oriented and broadly synthetic, to construct an understanding of the cultural, sociopolitical, and power relations and networks at play in the history of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism.
Jean-Louis explored, recorded, and transmitted the creativity, ingenuity, and invention, but also the ironies and cataclysms, of a tumultuous century traversed by his own generation and that of his parents. With his untimely passing, we lose not only a deeply humane teacher, generous mentor, and fiercely acute intellectual but also the living memory of a century of heroic optimism, unspeakable horror, and incomplete repair.
Claire Zimmerman
Jean-Louis’s Enjoinders
This reflection has been difficult to write, not only because I am still so sad but because it takes me back to my first association with Jean-Louis Cohen, during a painful time of life for me and my husband, Christopher Ratté, that is hard to revisit.
I was as impressed by J-L’s reach as a scholar—his remarkable command of material—as I was by his respect for how others thought and reasoned. He paid attention when his peers often seemed not to. Jean-Louis’s great personal self-confidence also created considerable openness, though I remember one occasion where he would not be quiet during a talk by a graduate student from a competing institution. He was, surprisingly, not infallible.
Christopher and Jean-Louis had neighboring offices. I took classes at NYU from my base at the CUNY Graduate Center. His astounding lectures were two-hour disquisitions on histories I had never encountered before, a density of presentation that belied mere facticity. Seminars meant working through and sharing the content of many books. These were intense and vivid explorations into the past from the present, to probe social and political context to the fullest degree possible. At the time, Christopher and I lived under a black cloud—related to the loss of a child—and Jean-Louis’s sensitivity to our situation laid the foundations for a friendship that has lasted nearly three decades and does not die with him. It’s true that we are all members of a guild. But his comportment differed markedly from others with those trademarks: he had a capacity for empathy. He was aware of what other people experienced. He took a focused interest.
More recently, we collaborated with Christina Crawford on Detroit Moscow Detroit, which happened after Christina and I met through his recommendation—another of his gifts. Christina and I took a memorable trip to the former Stalingrad (Jean-Louis went east to Cheliabinsk and Ekaterinburg), and we all met in Michigan to consult archives at the Henry Ford Museum and the Bentley Library. We then convened in Ann Arbor for a conference, in Cleveland for more archives, and in Albuquerque (I was on sabbatical), where, work finished, we drove through the old mining jumbles and dramatic landscapes of Madrid and Cerrillos. Each meeting was memorable—more so now—for the things we found, for the collaboration, for the social contact, and for the concrete results.
Notes to the book’s authors within a day of his death went something like this: “Yesterday, August 7, we received news from the press that the first printed copies of DMD had arrived. Yesterday we learned that Jean-Louis had died suddenly. . . His generosity is well-known; here we receive from the sad fate that befell him intense feelings of shock that are painfully life-affirming. . .”
“Focus!” he enjoined during our Albuquerque session in early 2022. Among his many abilities were a sharp focus on matters at hand, a penetrating intelligence, and the capacity to work quickly and well. I take his enjoinder at face value. His death leaves not a legacy but rather an injunction to move ahead. It has had a catalytic effect, which slow deepening into venerable old age does not. Better that Jean-Louis had become very old with his children and grandchildren around him. But this is where we find ourselves today, one remarkable fellow traveler short, while his words still ring in our ears.
Antoine Picon
The class met in the Melpomène room, a cavernous space where Beaux Arts students exhibited their competition drawings until 1968. I had just begun to study architecture after following a scientific curriculum. The professor—Jean-Louis Cohen, then in his early thirties—was offering a sweeping overview of architectural history from the Babylonians to the Modern Movement. What could have been a dry, superficial take on the evolution of architectural forms was an eye-opening introduction to design as a culture as diverse as the societies that produced it. He hypnotized us in his soft-spoken and erudite way, with a pinch of humor here and there. The course was spread over two years, with the second dealing with the urban dimension. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this pedagogic tour de force would make me comfortable with architectural and urban history in a way that a more fragmented and specialized approach would have been unable to do. To this day, I owe something to Jean-Louis’s intellectual generosity, and I still believe in survey courses.
David Sadighian
“Take it easy!” Jean-Louis responded in his typically calming manner when I, plagued with the anxiety of a graduate student, emailed him to say that I was running late to drop off my dissertation for defense. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in April 2023 when I burst into his office at the Institute of Fine Arts; Jean-Louis welcomed me with a relaxed air. How is it possible, I thought, that the busiest scholar in our field—with upcoming trips to Paris, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, among many other places, each for a different exhibition or event of his making—could be so at ease? But that was Jean-Louis. He juggled an endless list of commitments with grace, as though he had more hours in the day than the rest of us. That he managed to have so much time—that he managed to make so much time for everything and everyone—makes his untimely passing unimaginable. He will, of course, be remembered for his pathbreaking scholarship and exhibitions. What I will cherish most, however, is the time he made for junior scholars like me. How he showed up to our conference presentations and asked rigorous questions. How he provided incisive feedback on our paper drafts. How he invested so much time in us despite his pressing work elsewhere. His departure is an incalculable loss for our field, but by reflecting on his remarkable life, he continues to teach us all: to be present, to be generous, to be unceasing in our search for expansive histories of architecture.
Enrique Ramirez
I have many memories of my time in Jean-Louis’s orbit, but one stands out. In 2008, for the very last meeting of his seminar at Princeton on architecture during World War II, he screened Alain Resnais’s 1956 documentary Night and Fog. We were all moved by the film, caught up in its stark visuals, collectively breathless, processing—always processing. There was silence afterward. Not deafening but atypical, for Jean-Louis was never short for words. But there we were, in a darkened seminar room, enveloped in stillness. And when I turned away from the screen to look at the head of the table, there was Jean-Louis, sobbing quietly. It was a powerful moment that revealed his profound compassion and vulnerability. We all connected to Jean-Louis at that moment and in perpetuity. He endeared himself to so many of us.
Irene Sunwoo
It was always a delight to run into Jean-Louis in the stacks and reading room at Columbia’s Avery Library, where he would sit among students, seemingly in solidarity with us. Once, after reviewing a paper draft, he returned the pages to me and said, “I love to learn.” That love manifested so profoundly through his generosity towards his students, who brought him real joy with their endless supply of new architectural discoveries, which later became the fabric of lasting friendships.
His class trips were legendary. In 2011, he took his Princeton seminar students to Russia. Then deeply ABD, I was not enrolled in the class, but he let me tag along anyway. I thought I might only visit Russia once in my lifetime, and if I did, I would want to do it with Jean-Louis. It was a wild week full of surreal moments. A “Russian picnic” (vodka and pickles) at Melnikov House. Poking around Narkomfin. A bike tour of Moscow. Jean-Louis delivered a lecture, in Russian, at the Garage about his long scholarly relationship with the country. In his talk, he showed us a photo of his young self—with a full head of hair! During that trip, some of us began to refer to him as J-Lo (which we still do today).
When I chose to leave academia to pursue a curatorial path, Jean-Louis was one of the few who did not question my decision, remaining so present and supportive with every new professional step I took. Over the years, he often engaged me in oblique conversations about how to strategically infiltrate institutions with critical agendas. What an affirmation it was each time he asked if he could bring his students to one of my exhibitions. The second-to-last time we met, I welcomed him and his students to the Architecture and Design galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he said hello to many “old friends” on the walls. The last time I saw him was at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where he was full of curiosity, energized, warm, with that sparkle in his clear blue eyes.
We were all in awe of his mastery of so many languages. Perhaps because of that, his English word choice could be odd. “Fasten your seatbelts! We are ready to begin this Tafuri conference!” “So-and-so is a real nerd!” “Another dean defenestrated!” He could also be radically, and tenderly, direct. I remember once he told me, quite plainly, “I’m a happy guy.”