Jean-Louis Cohen is among today’s preeminent historians of modern architecture. Although he first specialized in the Soviet avant-garde, his interests grew to encompass the whole of international modernism. Cohen’s encyclopedic 2012 overview of The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History, is as far-ranging a survey as anything written by Siegfried Giedion, Manfredo Tafuri, William Curtis, or Leonardo Benevolo. He has also organized a number of exhibitions on Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and lesser-known architects like André Lurçat.
The following interview took place the evening of October 21, 2019, and focused on four main points: the enduring relevance of the Soviet avant-garde; the relationship between revolutionary architectural form and revolutionary social content; the legacy of the Vkhutemas school for architecture in Moscow, often overshadowed by the smaller German Bauhaus; and Cohen’s new show at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal on “Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture.”
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