Review: Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War by Jean-Louis Cohen

Abstract

Jean-Louis Cohen Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War New Haven and Montreal: Yale University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011, 448 pp., 300 color illus. $50, ISBN 9782754105309 Through the ages, war has been a font of architectural innovation, spurring new techniques and materials, transmitting ideas about style (through cultural contact), form, and space making (through experiment), and shifting professional attitudes and training. War has also been architecture’s muse, as the Futurists or Erich Mendelsohn’s sketches from the front during World War I attest. When nations have tilted toward conflict, moreover, their home fronts have been transformed, and architecture has responded— often self-consciously. How strange that historians of twentieth-century architecture have only in recent years come to study this enduring and enormously fruitful relationship.1 In his book Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Jean-Louis Cohen nods to this tradition in previous generations, writing “there is nothing new about the relationship between architecture and armed conflict,” pointing out that Vitruvius was a military engineer (11). He then exceptionalizes the experience of World War II, when total war and the forces of modernity mobilized everything, altering the very dynamic of social relations and communication. This idea of totalization is neither a new theme nor a novel claim for what happened during World War II—or more broadly, modernity. One need only turn to imperial Rome, Leonardo’s Italy, or, as William Leuchtenburg has demonstrated, to the United States between the two world wars, to see the extent to which war has been the central dynamic of Western society, and martial language its conceptual framework.2 Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a moment when war, the forces of production, and culture have escaped dialectical transformation. The historiographical lacuna is more interesting. Cohen notes the strange omission of the war years in major texts on modern architecture, although the propensity of the architectural history canon to seek out exceptional and photogenic buildings helps explain the gap. Cohen, …