Jean-Louis Cohen. Photo: Mandanarch/Wikimedia Commons.
“Almost born in a concentration camp”
I GOT TO KNOW JEAN-LOUIS IN THE SUMMER OF 1986 when we were both invited to a conference on the historical avant-garde in architecture at the Wissenschaftskolleg in West Berlin. I was young and writing the second chapter of my dissertation, a piece of which I presented there. He seemed much older, more accomplished, less lost, or rather, not lost at all. I think he had acted beyond his years from a very young age. At a certain point, the even older generation entered into a debate about whether one should engage in research on architects who had collaborated with the Nazi regime in any way—as had, it had recently come out, Peter Behrens, prompting scholars such as Stanford Anderson to refuse to publish work about him. (Anderson eventually relented, releasing his book on Behrens, based on his dissertation, in 2000.) Jean-Louis voiced his dissent very forcefully. He prefaced his point by saying that he was “almost born in a concentration camp” and argued that we could not avoid talking about collaborators, otherwise we would not be able to do any research on modern architecture—a stance he maintained regarding Le Corbusier in recent years.
That phrase—“almost born in a concentration camp”—has stayed with me, surfacing many times over almost forty years and again in the wake of the devastating news of his death. But what could it possibly mean? Was his mother pregnant already in Auschwitz? Was he born shortly after the liberation? Only with the first obituaries did I learn he was born in 1949. Much younger than I thought! “Almost born in a concentration camp” meant that he had lived through his mother the immense trauma of the Holocaust, of surviving. This may have aged him prematurely, made him more responsible, more pressured to use all his time, to absorb everything, to live every second. I have never met someone so focused, so productive, so relentless in his search for architecture, publishing more than fifty books and curating so many key exhibitions.
Jean-Louis was also generous. It is often difficult to get people to read dissertations, to participate in defenses, or to advise students outside their home institution. It is hard, sometimes tedious unpaid labor. Jean-Louis was always there. Never once did he turn down a Ph.D. student at Princeton. This was owed, in part, to his voracious desire to learn more. He devoured dissertations with a hunger for knowledge and generously contributed with his immense encyclopedic wisdom. He facilitated research by providing leads, opening archives through his contacts everywhere, even in seemingly impenetrable places like Eastern Europe and Russia. Jean-Louis has left behind an army of grieving young scholars all over the world. I wrote to a few in the days after the news, still in shock.
First to Vanessa Grossman, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who collaborated with Jean-Louis on the extraordinary French pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale and on so many other projects. In May, they opened an exhibition on Paulo Mendes da Rocha in Porto they had cocurated. Only a week before his death, the two were working together on Zoom to finish the catalogue. Jean-Louis was excited to be heading to the family house in the Ardèche, the house that he loved so much and that his remarkable scientist mother had bought with reparations money as a survivor of Auschwitz. The house where he died.
Then to Evangelos Kotsioris, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose dissertation defense Jean-Louis attended last December and contributed such extraordinary advice and support to. After the defense, he pursued opportunities for its publication, convinced of its significance and urgency. Then to Holly Bushman, a current Ph.D. student, who had assisted Jean-Louis with classes recently and was doing archival research in Germany under his advice. I reached out to them as if reaching to his extended family, to let them know I was thinking of them. Jean-Louis has probably the largest family in our field.
After the conference in Berlin, we had a long dinner alone, and Jean-Louis suggested we go to East Berlin the next day. I had been there before, in the late 1970s, with another early, sudden departee: my professor from Barcelona Ignasi de Solà-Morales. We crossed Checkpoint Charlie and went looking for the Lemke house of Mies. This trip had been coming back into my memory all summer as I read Christa Wolf’s One Day a Year: 1960–2000 on the beach in Spain, trying to reconcile the East Berlin that she so beautifully describes in her diary with the glimpses I gathered in my excursion with Jean-Louis. The empty grey city. The formality of the state restaurant where we had lunch, with all the waiters dressed to the nines and nobody there except us and perhaps a couple of other people at a faraway table, the abysmal food, the luxurious, decadent service, the clear sense of being watched and listened to wherever we went. Jean-Louis was in his element. He knew the city well, how to move around, where to go. His German was fluent, of course. He was a polyglot, speaking so many languages as if to swallow as much of the world as possible.
1986 was also the year that Jean-Louis invited me to write for the massive catalogue Le Corbusier: une encyclopedie, which accompanied the exhibition at Centre Pompidou he cocurated with Bruno Reichlin for the centenary of Le Corbusier’s birth. So many things were happening to me that year, in a kind of explosion, with Jean-Louis often in the middle. We had crossed scholarly and personal paths repeatedly ever since, living only a block apart in downtown New York. First it was our common interest in Le Corbusier, then Mies. When we both participated in the End of the Century exhibition and catalogue in Los Angeles, he took the skyscraper as representative of the century, and I took the private house, as if we were collaborating from opposite poles without any words being spoken. Another bond was the shared obsession with war. His Architecture in Uniform (2011) was a tour de force. During its preparations, he managed to bring Princeton students to the Pentagon. Likewise, when working on Frank Gehry, he took his students to Los Angeles to see Gehry’s work and talk with him. This we had in common, too: the deep belief that you need to take students out of the classroom and into the world, something I had learned from Ignasi de Solà-Morales.
Physically, Jean Louis seemed massive. He moved through rooms with a very focused mind, almost like a politician, making sure to connect with everyone he thought he needed to, never completely getting lost in a conversation, in laughter, in alcohol. He was always purposeful, attentive to his next moves, and rarely off duty. Yet there were special moments when emotions would flow. I cannot forget an evening in La Barceloneta with Monique Eleb and Mark Wigley after another family tragedy in the house in Ardèche. There was great tenderness to Jean-Louis. I first felt this mix of collegiality and tenderness in Berlin and already miss it so much, as does the rest of his vast extended architectural family.
Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and the director of the Ph.D. program in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.
