Jean-Louis Cohen (1949-2023) and his last reflection for Domus

Through his life as a historian, critic, curator, and researcher Jean-Louis Cohen leaves the legacy of a cross-perspective view of history, able to read in architecture the sign of global and local politics, shedding light on the intimate interconnection, on the “interferences”, as one of his exhibitions was titled, of different trajectories and events impossible to consider as separate. Holding the Sheldon H. Solow Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University since 1994, Cohen had also been the creator of the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, as well as curator of a large number of exhibitions and research projects: from Modernity and its contradictions as researched through the French pavilion exhibition at the 2014 Venice Biennale, to architects during wartime in Architecture in Uniform (2011), transtemporality in The Future of Architecture. Since 1889 (2012), but most of all the city of Casablanca studied over two decades with Monique Eleb, Russian constructivism, and the great works on totemic figures, Le Corbusier for a lifetime and, recently, Frank O. Gehry (the catalog of the Canadian architect’s drawings was taking shape in these years). His relationship with Domus had lasted since the late 1980s, with project critiques, book presentations and conversations: in November 2022, on issue 1073, his most recent contribution had been published, a reflection on the recurrent and diffuse presence of urban forms, with which we wish to remember him.

The migration of architectural forms from the global level to the local one – and vice versa – is shaped by political and cultural relationships between nations and cities. Rather than thinking of buildings and urban schemes exclusively in polar terms, frontally opposing the global and the local scales, other configurations need to be identified, which can only be conceptualised by breaking with the existing models. The first among these models is that represented by empires and colonial policies. City networks have been generated by political systems of domination extending over vast territories. In the case of Greece, patterns were exported by the metropolises – the mother cities, as with Dura-Europos, a Hellenistic colony located in what is now Syria, with a plan following the principles of Hippodamus of Miletus. As for the Romans, they exported their norms on the scale of the empire. 

In the 13th century, an intense programme of urban creation was implemented on the contact lines between France and England, which were engaged in constant belligerence. The result was a network of new towns known as bastides. Comparable rules were used in the wide-ranging programme of internal colonisation undertaken in Russia by Catherine II, which led to the creation of hundreds of new towns, including Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev and Mariupol, which unfortunately have been making the headlines recently. The Spanish colonisation of Spain deployed geometry and legal rulings to create new urban settlements that shared the same gridded pattern. Although an unequal relationship par excellence, colonisation used channels that were far from being exclusively one-way, north to south, between metropolises and colonies. The colonial scenes sometimes communicated with each other according to south-south circuits. Certain spatial and aesthetic solutions from overseas migrated back to the metropolises, from urbanistic experiments such as those developed in Casablanca, to the idioms of Art Deco, for which colonies and protectorates acted as a laboratory. 

The second model opposes the local, regional or national space with the universal space, by privileging internationalising systems, such as the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), or the international movement for the garden city, and by seeing in concrete cities only local manifestations of these devices. Its clearest manifestation was the campaign for the construction of new towns undertaken in the USSR during Stalin’s first five-year plan, in which former city planner of Frankfurt Ernst May set up an office for the design of “standard” cities. Adapted to the features of local geographies, they shared a similar structural principle and comparable housing and public buildings based on a small number of types. After World War II, the slogan of the “functional city” introduced by CIAM in 1933 led to the search for a universal mode of representation of cities, using the 1947 “grid”, which reduced the structure of cities to the deployment of their functions. Rather soon, this reductive approach was challenged, most notably by the young founders of Team 10. 

There is a third model, which enhances the bilateral relationships between national scenes and cities. It singles out processes of idealisation, through which citywide or national cultures idealise and identify with one another. The most blatant case was the syndrome of Americanism that emerged in early 20th-century Europe, as the United States was seen as the “scene of the world to come”, to use the title of Georges Duhamel’s 1930 travelogue. 

Among the trans-urban relationships that have appeared throughout history, one of the most obvious is that of Venice with a number of cities. It is made clear in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, when Marco Polo declares to Kublai Khan: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” The Venetian merchant claims to his august interlocutor: “To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.” There are many Venices worldwide, as well as many Parises, which find their most caricatural expression in Las Vegas or some Chinese new towns. This third model operates on the scale of the big cities. But rather than comparing cities as large entities, I suggest observing what is at play, what is exchanged between them on different scales, and between their different constitutive elements. If each city is understood as a text, then the relationship between two cities can be seen through the prism of what literary theorist Gérard Genette has called “intertextuality”, or “transtextuality”. I propose a parody of this term by suggesting “trans-urbanity”, which can be defined simply as the more or less literal, more or less comprehensive presence of an urban form in another one. This widespread presence has remained one of the major symptoms of the relationship between global and local to this day, and is worthy of attention in today’s world.

Opening image: Jean-Louis Cohen, photo by Mandanarch