That an upsurge of interest in the history of architectural education at the École des Beaux-Arts should have marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 student protests that catalyzed the dismantling of the French state’s centuries-old centralized system of architectural education might take some by surprise. After all, renewed interest in the school during the 1970s was primarily an Anglo-American affair, centered on the instantly notorious 1975 exhibition The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In France, memories of 1968 were too fresh. Plans to bring MoMA’s show to Paris to finish its tour at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (after a stopover at the National Gallery of Canada), along with a proposed French translation of curator Arthur Drexler’s monumental catalogue (published only in 1977), all came to naught. The seminal essays in Drexler’s volume by the American trio of Richard Chaffee, David...

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