44 C O N T E X T 1 2 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 The world at war Architecture in Uniform: designing and building for the second world war Jean-Louis Cohen, CCA/Hazan/Yale UP, 2011, 447pp hardback, fully illustrated in black and white and colour, ISBN 978 0 920785 92 8, £40 This book is published in English and French editions in connection with the exhibition of the same name in Montreal from April to September 2011. Sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, it brings together vast amounts of material gathered in all the countries engaged in the wars of the ’30s and ’40s and their aftermath. This review can pick out only a few of the themes. The second world war is often regarded as having been an interruption to architectural careers. The flight from Nazi Europe or from the Stalinist USSR, the disruptions and distractions of war-work and military service, injuries or even annihilation meant a break in the pursuit of artistic and creative careers, sometimes never to be properly resumed in the later 1940s. This period of renewed austerity that followed in Europe after the peace produced some opportunities. But in general the progress of architecture and the lives of many of its practitioners had undergone a break. Lasting for a decade or more after the crisis years of the late 1930s, the war is often seen as an empty period for architecture and its creative development. Cohen’s book may be seen as serving to deny this usual view. The second world war clearly produced a huge quantity of state-sponsored manufacture and construction in the lead-up to the fighting and in the war itself. Afterwards there were bombed cities to rebuild, victory monuments to erect and memorials to the dead to design. The state became the patron-in-chief to a degree that had not been seen since the 17th century in Europe and its overseas colonies. Cohen amply demonstrates how the architecture of aggression began to be transformed from about 1943 onwards in the USA (it came later elsewhere, later-still in Eastern Europe) into aggressive consumerism. In his inaugural address, the incoming US president, Harry S Truman, spoke of the way in which, after a century of wars, the world was ready to be liberated through the production, and implicit consumption, of ‘more food, more clothing, more materials for housing and more mechanical power’. Modern society would be reshaped in the new peacetime era, using the tastes of the middle-class family (probably situated in small towns and cities in middle America) as its model and guide. The global realisation of this prophecy in the decades beyond the late 1940s has dictated historical events, the economy and virtually everything we make, purchase, enjoy and throw away ever since. Cohen reviews in 12 chapters almost every possible aspect of design and building across the combatant nations during the years of total war. For those too young to have seen or to have contemplated this topic, the book is an admirable introduction. For those who have already been engaged previously in these studies, the book’s chapter footnotes and the 20 pages of index, booklist and so on at the end will be a useful resource. Such tempting items as ColdWar Hothouses: inventing post-war culture from cockpit to Playboy (2004) may be found here. Cohen’s well-selected illustrations frequently produce surprising novelties: a wooden leg splint from the US modernist studio of Charles and Ray Eames, or a Corbusier poster from within Petain’s occupied France in 1942. That high priest of concrete structure is seen advocating the local sourcing of timber to build ‘provisional rural villages’ for housing those displaced by war from French cities. The AtlanticWall, subject of chapter 7, is depicted in photos of sites from Norway to France, culminating in an astonishing black-and-white item: Anne Garde’s 1987 photograph, ‘Submarine base in Bordeaux’. Graham Tite, conservation officer, BEAMS, Hertford alExpertise&ProjectSupport ThermaTech® isboth designed andbuilt herewithin theUK, by RestorativeTechniques Ltd, forboth the home andexportmarkets. RestorativeTechniques isan innovative supplierandmanufacturer of surface cleaning systemsand restoration products, with a high level of technical expertise, based onprofessional knowledge and significant, longexperience in the field. The company is farmore than simplya supplier. 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