Death of Jean-Louis Cohen, historian and practitioner of the city – Liberation

The architect, “radiant personality” with “greedy erudition”, died at the age of 74 in Ardèche, following an allergic reaction due to a hornet sting.

Architect and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen died on Monday August 7 at the age of 74. He succumbed to a heart attack caused by an allergic reaction due to a hornet sting, in his house in Ardèche where he spent his holidays. Born in Paris, this grandson of an architect graduated in 1973, then defended in 1985, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Ehess), a doctoral thesis on André Lurçat. After directing the architectural research program of the Ministry of Equipment in the early 1980s, he first taught at the Paris-Villemin school of architecture, then held the chair in the history of cities at the French Institute of urban planning at the University of Paris-VIII, until 2005. At the same time, in 1994 he was appointed professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Often chosen to be an exhibition curator, he was also a member of the scientific councils of several major institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles. For the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, he had designed “Architecture in uniform: designing and building for the Second World War”, an unprecedented exhibition, from which a catalog was drawn, on the role of architects in the war, including in the genocidal machine.