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The Journal of Architecture

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The Future of Architecture. Since 1889

a
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
a
University College Dublin
Published online: 06 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Kathleen James-Chakraborty (2012) The Future of Architecture. Since 1889, The Journal
of Architecture, 17:4, 609-612, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2012.709030

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.709030

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Book, exhibition and film reviews
Downloaded by [The Aga Khan University] at 04:49 11 November 2014
The Future of Architecture. Since 1889
By Jean-Louis Cohen
Phaidon, 2012
ISBN 978 0 7148 4598 2, £45.00
Hardback, pp. 528 with illustrations
For more than a generation, two surveys of modern
architecture, Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architec-
ture: A Critical History, first published in 1980, and
William Curtis’s Modern Architecture since 1900,
in print since 1983, have dominated the market.
Although both authors have regularly published
new additions that address more recent construc-
tion, the approach they take is fundamentally
grounded in the issues of a moment in time before
most of their readers were born. Alan Colquhoun’s
relatively compact Modern Architecture, which
appeared in 2002, is the only recent challenger.
The publication of The Future of Architecture.
Since 1989. by Jean-Louis Cohen, is thus likely to
catch the attention of any architect or architectural
historian or anyone who has ever taught a course
on modern architecture or wanted to recommend
an introduction to the subject to a friend. Most
will begin by perusing its nearly six hundred illus-
trations to see what is in and what is out. Only
then will they begin to read its thirty-five chapters,
much less turn their attention to details such as foot-
notes and bibliography.
Cohen, who divides his time between Paris and
New York, is a distinguished scholar, whose recent
Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for
the Second World War, the catalogue to an exhibi-
# 2012 The Journal of Architecture
609
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 17
Number 4
tion held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
in 2011, is a dazzling performance. Eminently read-
able and studded with fresh comparison and insights
on almost every page, that effort is sure to change
the way in which historians as well as architectural
historians consider the intersection of the world’s
most lethal war and the twentieth century’s defining
approach to the design of buildings and the planning
of cities. Unfortunately it proves difficult to sustain
such a high level of originality, and above all of
clarity, across the longer trajectory of The Future of
Architecture, even if this is a story Cohen knows extra-
ordinarily well. Anyone who teaches this subject will
learn a great deal from Cohen’s account, but Cohen
ultimately fails to give us either a compellingly new
story or to provide an account that is easily digestible
by a beginner.
The good news first. This is a beautifully produced
volume, studded with illustrations, many of them in
colour, more than a few of which are sure to surprise
and delight even the most erudite scholar. In keeping
with the title, Cohen focuses on modernism’s suc-
cesses. The coverage of the period 1920 to 1960 is
particularly strong. Cohen includes far more eastern
European and Italian architecture than previous
books of this kind in English have featured, and the
chapters recapping the material in Architecture in
Uniform are superb. Perhaps Cohen’s most original
contribution is the degree to which he quite literally
depicts the mechanisms through which architectural
ideas have been conveyed across the course of the
century; photographs of classrooms, exhibitions
and journal covers abound, as for that matter do
1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.709030
 610
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construction views. Although he announces in the
introduction that his subject is 1889 to 2000, the con-
clusion offers a particularly sage appraisal of the con-
temporary architectural scene. The well-organised
bibliography lists many European publications unfa-
miliar to most scholars in the English-speaking world.
Ultimately, the book The Future of Architecture
most resembles, however, is Henry-Russell Hitch-
cock’s Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen-
turies, which first appeared in 1958. Much of
Cohen’s book is a catalogue of architects, their
buildings, and the chains of influence, whether
formal or theoretical, which tie them together. He
rarely devotes more than a few sentences to the
work he illustrates, and he often devotes nearly as
much attention to works that are not shown. Fur-
thermore, he includes almost no plans. This means
that all but the most erudite readers are likely to
have difficulty following his arguments, which are
often buried in a confusing web of detail.
The full paragraph Cohen devotes to the Villa
Savoye, which is not illustrated, provides a charac-
teristic example of the strengths and weaknesses
of his approach. He describes it as ‘one of the cano-
nical buildings of the twentieth century’, and as
sitting ‘in the middle of a meadow like a flying
machine that has just barely touched down’,
before proceeding with an insightful, if brief discus-
sion of its spatial arrangement:
The boxlike structure features three levels inter-
connected by a ramp that guides the promenade
architecturale. Wedged between the ground-
floor pilotis (stilts), through which automobiles
could slip in and out, and the top-floor solarium
is the main level, an L-shaped floor built around
a patio and illuminated by a horizontal strip of
windows overlooking the landscape. The vast
living room is basically doubled in surface by the
patio, while the bedrooms and bathrooms echo
the floor plans of eighteenth-century Parisian
apartments. (p.127)
In the absence of plan, section or elevation, these
details are not likely to be readily grasped by the
new student, even as Cohen’s talent at capturing
the essence of this scheme and situating it in a sur-
prising context, in this case that of the eighteenth-
century Parisian flat, will certainly impress his peers.
Cohen does not, except for the chapters on the
Second World War and its aftermath, offer a full
accounting of the changes in the built environment
over the course of the twentieth century or the
reasons for them. Despite the claim on the bright
yellow sticker attached to my review copy that that
is ‘a worldwide history’, in fact only about 15% of
the illustrations are of buildings located outside
Europe and the English-speaking world (this is
exactly the same percentage found in the latest
edition of Curtis); no sub-Saharan African building
merits an illustration. This adherence to convention
extends to gender, which is almost never mentioned.
The contribution of women, aside from the usual
illustrations of the Frankfurt kitchen, E-1027, and
Zaha Hadid’s Peak project, is minimal, although the
coverage of firms, from Alison and Peter Smithson
through to Matthias Sauerbruch and Louise
Hutton, in which women are partners is quite
good. The bibliography, which is very short on
recent scholarship by Americans, does not include
Alice Friedman’s classic Women and the Making of
the Modern House; Cohen, however, dismisses

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Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the subject of Fried-
man’s strongest and most widely cited chapter, ‘as
an effete echo of Mies’s Farnsworth House’. (p.351)
That such a superb scholar can produce such a
banal account is telling. The state of modern archi-
tecture almost certainly shares the blame with
Cohen, who, like almost every important chronicler
of the subject before him, writes in defence of many
of modern architecture’s basic assumptions (no one
could tell from reading The Future of Architecture
why postmodernism appeared so exciting to an
entire generation of reasonably intelligent archi-
tects, nor why it retains much of its appeal with a
broader public, especially across the English-speak-
ing world). Cohen fails to address the issue of how
abstract forms, often paired with new construction
techniques, can continue to represent the future
for over a century. Perhaps it is time to imagine an
architecture that addresses new conditions,
whether the internet, sustainability, or the scale of
megalopoli, and that looks entirely different from
anything included here. That, however, is a chal-
lenge for architects rather than historians.
Even those who adhere to the conventional narra-
tive of mostly white (although at times also Japa-
nese) men designing aesthetically ambitious, if not
necessarily conventionally beautiful, buildings need
to acknowledge the limits of that story. Too often
historians of modern architecture, Cohen very
much included, seem to be little more than cheer-
leaders for the upper echelons of the architectural
profession. Whether or not a particular scholar
decides to imagine ways of chronicling the full
range of buildings produced across the course of
the twentieth century and the varied impetuses for
611
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 17
Number 4
them, we as a community must learn to confront,
understand, and explain even environments we
find repulsive. This remains perhaps the most
radical challenge posed by early postmodernists,
especially Denise Scott Brown.
A story such as the one Cohen tells needs to have
its boundaries more clearly delineated. What is
being excluded and why? Buildings that are ugly,
building that are not illustrative of a theoretical pos-
ition, buildings erected without the participation of
architects? All contributed towards imagining the
future of architecture. That would be a very differ-
ent book from the one that Cohen set out to
write, but it is one that we also need and that
might better reflect the mainstream of the discipline
in the United States, if not necessarily Europe.
Moreover, even accounts that share Building the
Future’s relatively narrow focus need to acknowl-
edge that architects making decisions about form
and materials have never been the whole story.
Modern architecture rose and fell and rose again
and again not just because of the genius of Le
Corbusier at sculpting unconventional forms out
of ordinary materials, but also because of the multi-
tude of things it represented, and also failed to rep-
resent, to potential clients and publics. Alternatives
were always available, but they could be too expens-
ive, as well as simply unfashionable. And not every-
one wanted to imagine, much less inhabit, the
future. Working- and middle-class consumers, par-
ticularly in Europe and the English-speaking world,
proved particularly hesitant, especially in compari-
son to urban middle classes in Asia, Africa and
Latin America. Identifying the public—from
cinema proprietors to Catholic bishops, corporate
 612

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film reviews
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executive to college professors—who embraced
change, as well as those who remained wedded to
new iterations of the familiar and conventional,
would help students and scholars alike better to
understand the boundaries of what remains one
of the twentieth century’s most pervasive forms
of cultural expression. In the meantime, one can
turn to Cohen for what remains, despite its
considerable flaws, the freshest and most wide-
ranging account we have of modern architecture’s
middle decades.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
University College Dublin