Jacobé Huet, PhD

Huet is a historian of modern architecture with a focus on the transcultural Mediterranean. She is currently working on her first book project. This inquiry revisits the white cube as a quintessential modernist motif. White and cubical volumes are ubiquitous throughout the designs of avant-garde architects in the first half of the 20^th century. Historians and theorists made the white cube an emblem of European modernism, consistently associating this motif with architectural placelessness and machine-age aesthetics. Huet's book project shifts this paradigm by recasting the modernist white cube as a product of regionalist inspiration and postcolonial agency in the transcultural Mediterranean. Based on new archival findings attesting to Adolf Loos, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier’s extensive Mediterranean travels, she argues that these modernists appropriated key features of Greek island villages and North African medinas to formulate their white and cubical designs. Measuring these architects’ primitivist vision of vernacular against the discourses of dissident Mediterranean figures, she demonstrates that celebrated designers, unnamed builders, scholars of the built environment, and social housing residents formulated contesting definitions of this architectural motif. A segment of this project was recently published in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World.

    - Jacobé Huet