The emergence of modern architecture worldwide coincided with the rise of the motor car. Architects drove cars and developed a new perception of the landscape. They built specific structures to house cars - garages and parkings in particular - and introduced the car into domestic space. The car became also a model for their designs, and the Fordist way of production an inspiration for building plans and territorial designs, from the OSA’s disurbanist designs to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. And some architects - Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Renzo Piano, among others, went as far as designing cars themselves.
Jean-Louis Cohen is a French architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and city planning. Since 1994 he has been the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University Institute of Fine Arts.