Un americano a Parigi, un parigino a New York

Jean-Louis Cohen’s interest in Americanism and Americanization in architecture transcends the historiographical attention to the cultural exchanges between the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, it intersects a biographical trajectory and a profoundly transnational intellectual project, encompassing studies and research works as well as academic and institutional experiences. This essay proposes to read Cohen’s contributions to these themes – from his pioneering seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1982 to his most recent Detroit-Moscow-Detroit, published posthumously in 2023 – as the broadest testimony to an original historical-critical methodology and a personal approach to the discipline. These contributions embody both his idea of a ‘zigzag’ history and the ambition to build an ‘underground and diffuse’ school, a global network not tied to a specific location but capable of uniting generations of researchers and scholars.