After the conference in Berlin, we had a long dinner alone, and Jean-Louis suggested we go to East Berlin the next day. I had been there before, in the late 1970s, with another early, sudden departee: my professor from Barcelona Ignasi de Solà-Morales. We crossed Checkpoint Charlie and went looking for the Lemke house of Mies. This trip had been coming back into my memory all summer as I read Christa Wolf’s One Day a Year: 1960–2000 on the beach in Spain, trying to reconcile the East Berlin that she so beautifully describes in her diary with the glimpses I gathered in my excursion with Jean-Louis. The empty grey city. The formality of the state restaurant where we had lunch, with all the waiters dressed to the nines and nobody there except us and perhaps a couple of other people at a faraway table, the abysmal food, the luxurious, decadent service, the clear sense of being watched and listened to wherever we went. Jean-Louis was in his element. He knew the city well, how to move around, where to go. His German was fluent, of course. He was a polyglot, speaking so many languages as if to swallow as much of the world as possible.
1986 was also the year that Jean-Louis invited me to write for the massive catalogue Le Corbusier: une encyclopedie, which accompanied the exhibition at Centre Pompidou he cocurated with Bruno Reichlin for the centenary of Le Corbusier’s birth. So many things were happening to me that year, in a kind of explosion, with Jean-Louis often in the middle. We had crossed scholarly and personal paths repeatedly ever since, living only a block apart in downtown New York. First it was our common interest in Le Corbusier, then Mies. When we both participated in the End of the Century exhibition and catalogue in Los Angeles, he took the skyscraper as representative of the century, and I took the private house, as if we were collaborating from opposite poles without any words being spoken. Another bond was the shared obsession with war. His Architecture in Uniform (2011) was a tour de force. During its preparations, he managed to bring Princeton students to the Pentagon. Likewise, when working on Frank Gehry, he took his students to Los Angeles to see Gehry’s work and talk with him. This we had in common, too: the deep belief that you need to take students out of the classroom and into the world, something I had learned from Ignasi de Solà-Morales.
Physically, Jean Louis seemed massive. He moved through rooms with a very focused mind, almost like a politician, making sure to connect with everyone he thought he needed to, never completely getting lost in a conversation, in laughter, in alcohol. He was always purposeful, attentive to his next moves, and rarely off duty. Yet there were special moments when emotions would flow. I cannot forget an evening in La Barceloneta with Monique Eleb and Mark Wigley after another family tragedy in the house in Ardèche. There was great tenderness to Jean-Louis. I first felt this mix of collegiality and tenderness in Berlin and already miss it so much, as does the rest of his vast extended architectural family.
Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and the director of the Ph.D. program in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.