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Architect, critic, historian, and curator Jean-Louis Cohen, one of many world’s foremost specialists on twentieth-century structure and concrete planning, and a preeminent authority on Le Corbusier, died on August 7 on the age of seventy-four, after reportedly struggling an allergic response to a bee sting whereas on trip within the division of Ardennes in northeastern France. Information of his dying was confirmed by the New York College Institute of Superb Arts, the place he had served as Sheldon H. Solow Chair of Architectural Historical past since 1994. Cohen over the course of a profession spanning greater than 5 a long time gained a popularity as an insightful and profoundly educated interlocutor, creator, and professor, and a heat and beneficiant mentor. An occasional contributor to Artforum in addition to to quite a few different revered publications, he was the creator of extensively lauded monographs on Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and on the American affect on Russian structure. Regardless of his deep familiarity with the towering figures of structure, he championed an egalitarian view of the follow.
“The present architectural scene can’t be lowered to the monumental feats or excesses of a handful of well-known architects,” he informed the Brooklyn Rail in 2019. “Structure at the moment consists of lots of of hundreds of individuals worldwide engaged on homes and faculties, designing hospitals, and landscapes. It’s a pity, for my part, to see structure flattened out or understood solely as coping with the large monuments of states and firms. Structure is a follow that may, and in lots of instances does, produce our dwelling surroundings.”
Jean-Louis Cohen was born on July 20, 1949, in Paris. He studied structure first on the École Spéciale d’Structure, then on the Unité Pédagogique n° 6, and eventually on the Architecte DPLG, all in Paris. He earned his postgraduate architectural diploma in 1979 and in 1985 was awarded a Ph.D. in artwork historical past from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Initially interested by German modernism after which within the structure of the Soviet avant-garde, he quickly expanded his horizons to soak up the planning and structure of cities together with Algiers, Casablanca, New York, and Paris. Having launched his profession as director of the architectural analysis program on the French Ministry of Housing, he taught as a researcher on the Faculty of Structure Paris-Villemin, after which as a chair in city planning historical past on the Institut Français d’Urbanisme, College of Paris.
On being named the Solow Chair at NYU, Cohen moved to New York, however he continued to lecture and educate at establishments together with Princeton College, the College of Sydney, and TU Delft, within the Netherlands. As properly, he remained engaged in quite a few initiatives around the globe. In 1998, he was chosen to steer the event of the Cité de l’structure et du patrimoine in Paris. The museum opened in 2007, with Cohen having directed the trouble via 2003. Among the many many exhibitions he curated or cocurated over the course of his profession are “Paris-Moscou” (1979) and a hundredth-anniversary present of the work of Corbu (1987), each on the Centre Pompidou, Paris; “The Misplaced Vanguard” and “Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Trendy Landscapes” on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, New York (2007 and 2013, respectively); “Structure in Uniform: Designing and Constructing for the Second World Warfare” and “Constructing a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Structure” on the Canadian Centre for Structure (2011 and 2019, respectively); and an exhibition on the work of Italian architectural author Bruno Zevi on the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome (2018). In 2014, he curated the French Pavilion on the Venice Biennale, specializing in the triumphs and disasters of modernism. Along with the volumes on Corbu, Mies, and up to date Russian structure talked about above, in addition to quite a few others, he authored 1995’s Scenes of the World to Come: European Structure and the American Problem, 1893–1960 and, in recent times, two volumes of what was to be an eight-volume catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Frank Gehry; together with his former spouse Monique Eleb, who died this previous Could, he coauthored books on subjects together with French and African structure.
Cohen was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. Although his place within the architectural-historical pantheon has lengthy been cemented, his outlook remained labile. “I nonetheless suppose that buildings have a which means,” he informed Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2019. “I nonetheless suppose you must be in contact with buildings and websites and have the ability to give to the larger viewers the flexibility to appreciate that buildings aren’t three-dimensional photos, however are complicated objects which have a scale, which seize gentle in a specific means, which odor like one thing, which change in the course of the day and in the course of the seasons, which may be appropriated in some ways.”
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