BOOK REVIEW: The Future of Architecture Since 1889

The Future of Architecture Since 1889
by Jean-Louis Cohen
Phaidon, $75

Don’t be put off by the silly title. Few architectural historians are as lucid and insightful as Jean-Louis Cohen, and this magisterial survey distills his encyclopedic knowledge of the highways and byways of modernism. Rather than an epic narrative of great formgivers, now staled by familiarity, he explores the rich diversity of expression around the world through the end of the 20th century. Each of the 30 chapters focuses on a theme that might easily be expanded into a book, and the 600 illustrations are as eclectic and relevant as the text.

In compressing so much information into 500 pages, this survey could easily have become a dry summary of actors and buildings. Instead, Cohen gives an organic account of how architecture was shaped by social forces, economic growth, war, and advances in technology. He demonstrates the universality of new ideas, juxtaposing concrete frame buildings that were realized around 1910 by Gill, Perret, Maillart and by lesser known architects on a heroic scale in Wroclaw and Talinn.  We see how Peter Behrens progressed from his neo-Renaissance crematorium to the timeless functionalism of the AEG Turbine Factory in just two years, and the close similarity of the Zuev Workers Club in Moscow and Terragni’s Novocomun apartments in Como, both of 1927-29.  Period illustrations convey the shock of the new. This is history as it was lived, with all its contradictions and surprises.

Wisely, Cohen ends his account in the year 2000 with a few short sections on Frank Gehry, OMA, Jean Nouvel and Herzog & de Meuron as firms that define the present, but inevitably this ending feels cursory and anticlimactic. The present is evolving too widely and unpredictably to be encapsulated and analyzed with the authority Cohen brings to the past. Other histories will supplement this one in years to come, but are unlikely to supplant it. This is a must-have for architects, students and anyone who cares about the built environment.    

BOOK REVIEW: Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War

Publication Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (2011). © CCA / Hazan

Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War
by Jean-Louis Cohen
Canadian Centre for Architecture/Hazan ($50)  

As a scholar of modernism Jean-Louis Cohen has few rivals and Architecture in Uniform may be his most important book to date for it provides a broad-ranging account of a blank space in architectural history. It serves as a companion to an exhibition of the same name that was based on Cohen’s research and is on show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal through September 18. Book and exhibition chronicle the preparations for war, the devastation of aerial bombardment, and the ways in which architects and designers helped devise new forms and techniques of construction, ranging from bomb shelters to prefabrication.

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