Jean-Louis Cohen was trained as an architect and received a doctorate in history at the A 0/00 cole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. Since 1993, he has held the Sheldon. Solow Chair in the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. From 1998 to 2003, he led the project for the Cite de l'Architecture, a cultural center that opened in 2007 in Paris. Cohen's research activity focuses on twentieth-century architecture and planning in Germany and Russia, as well as on colonialism in North Africa. He has written extensively on Le Corbusier's work.
John Goodman is a translator and art historian. He has rendered some thirty books from French into English, notably work by Denis Diderot, Hubert Damisch, and Georges Didi-Huberman. Goodman has published widely on the visual culture of eighteenth-century Europe and is currently preparing a synthetic study of neoclassicism for Thames and Hudson's World of Art series.