Biography
Jacobé Huet is a historian of modern architecture with a focus on the transcultural Mediterranean.
Huet is completing the manuscript for her first book, under contract with Yale University Press. Histories of modern architecture have emphasized the formal inspiration that modernist architects drew from vernacular buildings across the Mediterranean, including Greek island villages and North African medinas. However, the other side of this modernist-vernacular encounter has remained largely unexamined. White Cube: Architectural Modernism and Mediterranean Vernacular narrates this missing half within a broader, reciprocal schema. This book argues that after modernist architects such as Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) and Le Corbusier (1887–1965) incorporated vernacular features, figures invested in vernacular across various Mediterranean locales responded critically to this modernist intervention. These protagonists include Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) and French Algerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970). The book refuses a strictly modernist history of vernacular-modernist encounters, instead proposing reciprocity as methodology. Methodological reciprocity is a mode of writing history that considers at least two interconnected perspectives and allows subjects’ divergences and convergences to structure a narrative. Beyond the Mediterranean, White Cube advances reciprocity as a methodological template for connective art and architectural histories.
Huet received her Ph.D. in history and theory of architecture from Harvard University in 2022. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned an M.A. from Williams College and a B.A. from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, both in art history. Her research has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from international academic centers. They include the Fondation Palladio, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
