Studio Odile Decq: The Latest Architecture and News

Spanning over 3 millennia with one of the highest concentrations of architecture in the world, Rome is a transcendental influence on the world's culture. Often called “The Eternal City,” it developed as the capital and seat of power of the Roman Empire, regarded by many as the first Imperial city and among the first ancient metropolises. As a city continuously occupied for over 28 centuries, Rome has maintained its countless layers of history to become a perfect depiction of old meets new. Rich in history, academia, and art, the Italian capital is now one of the most visited cities in the world.

Rome's historic center, which stretches from Piazza del Popolo to Piazza Venezia and from the east bank of the Tiber up to Piazza di Spagna, is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Along with its historical significance, the presence of renowned contemporary architects and designers in the city has made Rome an influential design destination. In 2019, it was the 14th most visited city in the world, welcoming over 8.6 million tourists seeking to discover the ways in which the history of the Ancient Romans blends with contemporary life, making it the third most visited city in Europe and the most popular tourist destination in Italy.

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Odile Decq was born in 1955 in Laval, France and studied at École Régionale d'Architecture in Rennes, Brittany. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure D'architecture in Paris-La Villette in 1978 and received her diploma from the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1979. Decq set up her practice in Paris the same year and soon met Benoît Cornette who was studying medicine at the time but switched to architecture. By 1985 he received his architecture degree and the couple renamed their firm into ODBC. In 1996, ODBC won the Golden Lion in Venice for their drawings, selected out of a pool of invited emerging voices that included Zaha Hadid, Enric Miralles, and Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio. That was the beginning of the computer drawings, expressing movement, ambiguities, layering, and overall new dynamics that characterize Decq’s liberated forms and spaces.

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Odile Decq has unveiled new images of the design for her first new residential building and luxury skyscraper in Barcelona, Spain. Called Antares, the project will be sited along the Mediterranean Sea. In addition to the architecture, Odile also designed the interiors. Antares was made to be a unique addition to the Barcelona skyline by taking the form of a distinctive architectural tower.

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Past, Present, Future is an interview project by Itinerant Office, asking acclaimed architects to share their perspectives on the constantly evolving world of architecture. Each interview is split into three video segments: Past, Present, and Future, in which interviewees discuss their thoughts and experiences of architecture through each of those lenses. The first episode of the project featured 11 architects from Italy and the Netherlands and Episode II is comprised of interviews with 13 architects from Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.

Odile Decq has won the 2016 Jane Drew Prize as part of the Architectural Review's (AR) annual Women in Architecture Awards. Co-founder of Studio Odile Decq, the French architect was awarded for being a "a creative powerhouse, spirited breaker of rules and advocate of equality." Her diverse portfolio ranges from art galleries and museums, to social housing and infrastructure. She is best known for the Cargo incubator building in Paris and the Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum in Nanjing, China.

Every year, citizens of Catalonia commemorate the events of September 11th 1714, a key date in the War of the Spanish Succession that has come to symbolize what Voltaire called "the Barcelonans' extreme love of freedom." With this year marking the 300th anniversary of these events, Barcelona Cultura enlisted the Fundació Enric Miralles to curate 7 public installations around the city as part of its Tricentenari BCN program.

The result is BCN RE.SET, organized by Benedetta Tagliabue of the Fundació Enric Miralles and stage director Àlex Ollé, which invited guest architects from countries all over the world to colloborate with local universities and create installations symbolizing 6 political and ideological concepts: identity, freedom, Europe, diversity, democracy and memory. These installations will be in place until September 11th. Read on after the break for descriptions of all 6 installations.

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Odile Decq has announced that she is launching a new kind of architecture school based upon the idea of "Confluence," an educational framework that "erases the predefined limits of the traditional academic structures for the benefit of the collaboration of talents, thoughts and disciplines."

The Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, which will be located in in Lyon, France, will bring together "Architects, critics, artists, thinkers, philosophers, film-makers, scientists, engineers and manufacturers" in order to develop an architecture that develops ideas unconstrained by "stylistic prejudice or ideology." More on this new initiative, after the break.