«I’m a storyteller»: Interview with Jean-Louis Cohen

Abstract

Jean-Louis Cohen was brought up during the Cold War in Paris, between the portraits of Einstein and Stalin, in a family of left-wing scientists. Regardless of having become an architect, a different professional career of his parents, they had inevitably marked his future. The rigorous way in which he later worked as an architectural historian is symptomatic of this, as is the way in which he maintained a heterodox left-wing ideology that accompanied him throughout his life. He studied in Paris at a time when it was possible to attend a lecture by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher Michel Foucault or the writer Roland Barthes within a 500-metre radius. But it was Jean Prouvé’s classes — who was, after all, a metalworker and self-taught architect — that made him realise that architecture is, above all, an activity of action and of construction. He started travelling at that time. Firstly, to visit works of architecture, and later to reveal them to the world (a task he never abandoned). With a unique critical sense, Cohen has spent his life dismantling some of the false and clear ideas on which Western historiography has been based. He has organised some of the most extraordinary architectural exhibitions of the 21st century, such as Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (2011), Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013), Modernity: Promise or Menace? (2014) or the most recent Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020). Jean-Louis Cohen was not just one of the most important contemporary architectural historians. He was much more than that. Given his eclectic nature he impersonated the architectural historian of contemporaneity himself. He left us unexpectedly on 7 August 2023. When we conducted this interview, we were far from knowing that it would be one of his last, nor that it would take place just before he gave one of his last lectures, as part of the PhD in Contemporary Architecture at the Autonomous University of Lisbon. In this interview, he portrayed himself as a storyteller, underscoring that his research evolves through the narrative act — whether in a classroom, an exhibition, or a book. The various mediums that characterised his prolific output were essentially tools for testing his thoughts and advancing toward his overarching goal: the pursuit of knowledge.