Jean-Louis Cohen was an extraordinary historian and a uniquely gifted intellectual, critic, and institution builder, capable of understanding diverse cultures and situations wisely and with compassion. He was curious, engaged, political, funny, humble, generous with his expertise, and, most impressively, able to do many things at the same time without ever seeming busy. But his sudden death last summer left many projects that his vivid mind would have conceived up in the air.

This event, open to the public, brings together in conversation some of the people that were collaborating on several of these unfinished projects. Cohen’s archive, which he donated to the CCA in 2019, might reveal some of the directions they might have taken.

Event program:

I. Colonial Footprints

Samia Henni, French Power in North Africa
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Camps and Coercive Settlements

II. Forms of Practice

Mathilde Cohen, on “A Father’s Unfinished Autotopobiography.”
Vanessa Grossman, on Mendes da Rocha
Frank Gehry, Catalogue Raisonné (text read by Sylvia Lavin)
Martien de Vletter and Jillian Forsyth, on the AP210 fonds

III. Modernization and Power

Paul Bouet, The Vichy Project
Claire Zimmerman and Christina Crawford, Detroit–Moscow–Detroit
Christina Crawford, Russian ≠ Soviet Architecture [musings on the uncompleted Russia’s Architecture 1861–1991: Poetics and Politics]

Responses by Sylvia Lavin