# 67 | Architecture in Uniform | Jean-Louis Cohen

sciencespo.fr/artsetsocietes/en/archives/939

“Architecture in Uniform,” which is

the title of Jean-Louis Cohen’s excellent
exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du
Patrimoine in Paris, presents projects both
known and unknown that came into being
between the Nazi’s destruction of Guernica
in 1937 and the Allies’ atomic
bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945. The interest of his academic
research unit lies in its broad observational
spectrum of countries that were engaged in
the process of war in Europe, Japan, and
the United States. For our seminar, he has
agreed to discuss his methods of work and the reasons that drove him to relate gigantic
projects as different as the Pentagon in the United States and Auschwitz and the
Peenemünde Army Research Center in the territories annexed by the Reich and in
Germany. What they have in common is that they all belong to a “modernization” process
involving forms, techniques, and construction procedures.

Architects, draftsmen, and engineers played a major role in this process whose goal
was to give efficient form to war factories from the Pacific to the Urals.

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac

Jean-Louis Cohen

World War II affected soldiers and civilians alike between 1939 and 1945, when all
the human resources of the respective belligerents were mustered. Architecture was no
shirker during this period of mobilization and, despite what most histories of the
discipline claim to this day, it underwent a dense period of research and change.
Between the destruction of Guernica by the Nazis in 1937 and that of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki by the Americans in 1945, many architects took part in the fight. The war called
up all forms of their expertise, knowledge of construction techniques, visual knowledge,
and organizational skills. Mobilized as a group, architects also were faced with personal
choices, particularly so in the case of those called upon to participate in the criminal
policies of the Nazis. In this sense, the war also tested their moral fiber. Some of them
were complicit in extermination policies while others were to be counted among the
victims.
Cities and Homes in Time of War
As early as the 1920s, the writer André Maurois predicted that “The next war … will be so
horrible that all who experienced this one will look back on it with regret. The cities in the
rear will be completely destroyed by aerial attacks.” Indeed, the growth of aviation

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completely changed the previous distinctions between the battle front and the home front.
The chronicle of the war was thus punctuated by bombings whose intent was to terrorize
civilian populations, with the first of these launched by the Axis forces: the Japanese
flattened Chongqing and Shanghai, the Germans bombed Guernica, in the Basque
country, then Rotterdam, and, during the Blitz of 1940, London. From 1942 on, some of
the Allies engaged in their own aerial offensives, which would devastate German and
Japanese cities as well as cities in occupied countries such as France or Italy.
Much more than the Great War had ever done, World War II extended its hold far beyond
the combat zones. The German writer Ernst Jünger had a premonition of this when, in
1930, he underscored “the rational structure and mercilessness” of the war of 1914-1918.
Mobilization in the armed forces and in factories was coupled, de facto, with a requisition
of dwellings. All mineral and agricultural raw materials as well as industrial materials
were pressed into service for nations’ war efforts. The field of synthetic materials thus
broadened from fuels to elastomers and to vast ranges of new products such as plastics.
The concern with conservation of materials entailed a new economics-based project ethic.
Particular attention was paid to household energy consumption, which led to the
launching of the first campaigns ever conducted in favor of thermal insulation.Factories
in Time of War
The construction of thousands of factories required for the production of aircraft,
vehicles, and munitions summoned up, from the Pacific to the Urals, an army of project
designers and draftsmen in which civil engineers and architects played leading roles.
A striking phenomenon that extended trends from the 1930s was the emergence, in
practically all countries, of a new industrial geography that was intended to reduce the
risk of aerial attack by removing factories from countries’ borders.
Factories changed in scale and became groupings that sometimes attained the dimensions
of genuine cities, employing tens of thousands of workers. Made necessary by the strict
requirements of air-raid blackouts and made possible by the combination of lightweight
span structures, air conditioning, and florescent lighting that allowed round-the-clock
operations, the windowless factory dreamt up in the United States would give rise, after
the war, to one of the most common building types found today on the outskirts of towns
and cities: the Big Box that can be adapted to pretty much any use.
To house workers, it was in the United States that the most sweeping housing
construction program was carried out. Enacted in 1940, the Housing Act, which took its
name from Texas Congressman Fritz G. Lanham, allowed the massive use of Federal
credits for housing construction. In addition to the number of housing units built through
private initiative, 625,000 housing units would be produced between 1940 and 1944
under this law, 580,000 of which were temporary. Most of those units were destroyed
starting in 1945.

War and Mobility

The mobility of the forces engaged in World War II far exceeded the levels of previous
conflicts. The extension of the theater of operations to four continents involved intensive
movement of men and their equipment, operating thousands of miles from their base.
Architects therefore concentrated their inventive energies on the construction of
lightweight modular structures, especially ones that could be assembled and

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disassembled. The prolific inventor R. Buckminster Fuller used the corrugated steel
components of grain silos from the American Middle West to design the Dymaxion
Deployment Unit that would shelter troops sent to the Persian Gulf in 1942-1943. The
more radical experiments of Konrad Wachsmann and Max Mengeringhausen were to
remain even more marginal.
The greatest successes came from those projects whose precision and simplicity allowed
for industrial mass production. In the realm of building structures, there was the Quonset
hut, widely used to shelter troops. As for infrastructures, modular bridges developed by
Donald Bailey ensured Allied troops’ mobility within Europe, where 1,500 of them were
assembled. And the greatest success of all, which played a decisive role in the Allies’
strategic victory during the Normandy landings in 1944, was the Mulberry artificial
harbor, whose components were transported by sea from England. As Albert Speer would
later admit, this ingenious device rendered the Atlantic Wall inoperative by itself alone.

Shelters and Camouflage Against Aerial Threats

While danger from the air had already made itself felt during World War I, though then
only in a relatively modest fashion, this menace took on new dimensions in the 1930s.
Modern architects would not take long to show an interest in this new set of architectural
and urban issues.
In 1942, Salvador Dalí wrote that the “War of Production” had to be coupled with a war of
“magic.” This consisted in an effort to conceal armed forces, factories, and even whole
cities from the view of enemy aviators in which one had to call upon the visual skills of
architects and landscape artists.
Each warring nation set up a camouflage service, which sometimes led to extremely
sophisticated research into daytime and nighttime perception of landscapes and into the
effects of sunlight or cloudy skies because of the potentially crucial role of shadows. A
truly scientific approach to architecture was emerging at that time, and it was followed up
with rigorous field-testing procedures.
This work was pursued on every scale, from the concealment of a single gun battery,
command post, or isolated bunker to the apparent displacement of an entire city. The
well-known project for a “fake Paris”—imagined in 1918 to confuse German zeppelins—
inspired spectacular ventures, as at Hamburg, where a large-scale operation began in 1941
to “displace” visually a portion of the city center.

Architectural Giganticism

In a 1944 text on “Bigness and its Effects on Life,” the German urban planner Ludwig
Hilberseimer, who was then teaching in Chicago, stated that “the main trend of our time
is toward bigness.” This trend was particularly evident in industrial production, logistics,
and the conduct of the conflict.
Large buildings were themselves set within quite vast territorial networks. In
Washington, the Pentagon was the central point in an extensive system of highways and
parking lots. The atomic facilities at Oak Ridge were made possible at this site only
because they were connected to the hydroelectric facilities of the Tennessee Valley
Authority. The same held true for Soviet industrial projects east of the Urals and,
especially, for Nazi projects. Thus, the Auschwitz camp was but one component in a great

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industrial conglomeration situated at the intersection of rail lines linking it to Europe as a
whole.
In order to design such systems, teams of architects were assembled on an unprecedented
scale, these teams operating within civilian and military administrations or in the form of
private agencies, such as the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whose unstoppable
growth began with the project for the town of Oak Ridge in Tennessee.

The Postwar Period: A World Transformed

The deadliest conflict in human history came to an end with the capitulation of
Japan on September 2, 1945. The war did not only leave behind millions of dead and
millions of traumatized survivors, as well as thousands of cities in ruins. It also
fundamentally transformed human practices, from science and technique to culture.
Architecture was no exception to these changes that affected all societies. In the six years
of the War, the scale of projects had been altered, new materials appeared, and, with
them, ideas for the industrial production of housing and public edifices, which had been
imagined prior to 1939, now became tangible possibilities. Questions that had been
rejected by modern architects, such as the issue of monumentality, became vital features
of public debates when the commemoration of sacrifices and victories proved to be a
necessary task.
A cultural transformation also took place for all those men and women who had
encountered the new technologies: soldiers reverting to civilian life after having used
airplanes, Jeeps, and walkie-talkies and women returning to their homes after having
worked in industrial production no longer had the same expectations and were ready to
accept new materials and modern architectural solutions to housing issues.
Aside from the plans for reconstruction, which had occupied European architects as early
as 1941, and their implementation, which would extend into the mid-1950s, housing
studies relied on the results of research conducted during the War. Thus was heralded a
new, more objective form of practice.

1. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Vauthier, “Courbes des points du territoire national [situés] à
200, 400, 600 et 800 km de la frontière dangereuse,” in Le Danger aérien et l’avenir du
pays (1930). Collection of the author. All rignts reserved.

2. Agricultural-based plastics production, in E. F. Lougee, Plastics from Farm and Forests

(1943). Collection of the author. All rights reserved.

3. Albert Kahn Associates, Dodge Aircraft Factory, Chicago, 1943. Superimposition of the
factory’s blueprint on an aerial view of Manhattan; illustration printed in The
Architectural Forum, December 1943. Collection of the author. All rights reserved.

4. Mulberry artificial harbor at Arromanches. Landing of a convoy of ambulances,

September 1944; illustration printed in L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 2 (1945). Collection
of the author. All rights reserved.

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5. Max Mengeringhausen, the MERO
system. Examples of use proposed in
1943; illustration printed in
Raumfachwerke aus Stäben und
Knoten, 1975. Collection of the author.
All rights reserved.

6. “Camouflage of a Grain Elevator,”

plate by Konrad F. Wittmann,
Industrial Camouflage Manual, 1942.
Collection of the author. All rights
reserved.

7. George Edwin Bergstrom, David

Witmer. Bâtiment du Département de
la Guerre (Pentagone), Arlington,
Virginie, 1941-1943, vue aérienne
générale, 1953 ; National Archives and
Records Administration, Washington.
All rights reserved.

8. Walter Schlempp, power station,

Peenemünde rocket base, c. 1942. 2011
photograph by the author. All rights
reserved.

9. Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso,

Enrico Peressutti, and Ernesto Nathan
Rogers, Monument to the Victims of
Nazi Concentration Camps, erected
within the Cimitero Monumentale di
Milano, 1946. 2005 photograph by the
author. All rights reserved.

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 Bibliography

ALBRECHT, Donald, World War II and the American Dream. How Wartime Building
Changed a Nation, Washington, Cambridge, Mass., National Building Museum, MIT
Press, 1995.

BOSMA, Koos, Shelter City: Protecting Citizens Against Air Raids. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012.

COHEN, Jean-Louis, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second
World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

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 DECKER, Julie, and Chris CHIEI. Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

GOODEN, Henrietta. Camouflage and Art: Design for Deception in World War 2.
London: Unicorn Press, 2007.

GUTSCHOW, Niels. Ordnungswahn: Architekten planen im “eingedeutschten Osten”

1939-1945. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann and Bâle, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2001.

GUTSCHOW, Niels and Jörn DÜWEL. Eds. A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town
Planning in Europe 1940-1945. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013.

SHANKEN, Andrew M. 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the

American Home Front. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

VIRILIO, Paul. Bunker Archeology: Texts and Photos (1975). Trans. from the French
by George Collins. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

VOLDMAN, Danièle. Reconstruction des villes françaises de 1940 à 1954: histoire

d’une politique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

Jean-Louis Cohen, an architect and historian, was born in Paris in 1949. Holder of the
Sheldon H. Solow Chair at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, he has designed
numerous exhibitions at the Pompidou Center, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, the Canadian
Center for Architecture, the French Institute of Architecture, and the Museum of Modern
Art. From 1998 to 2003, he directed the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine project in
Paris. Starting in 2014, he became a guest professor at the Collège de France.

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