Renée Gailhoustet, French architect, pioneer of social housing, and winner of the 2022 Royal Academy Architecture Prize, has passed away aged 93. As announced by the Royal Academy, she passed away in her home in Le Liégat, Ivry-sur-Seine, one of her best-known projects, which was completed in 1982. Throughout her career, stretching back to the 1960s, Renée Gailhoustet was a strong advocate for social housing, exemplifying through her work a vision of generous housing in harmony with their urban environments.
Renée Gailhoustet is one of the few female architects of her generation to achieve international recognition. Born in Oran in French Algeria in 1929, she enrolled in École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and gained her diploma in 1961, starting her forty-year career. After founding her own firm in 1964, she went on to produce a succession of diverse projects essentially involving public housing projects that integrated a wide array of facilities into the same macrostructures.
Gailhoustet pioneered a more urban form of Brutalism, where staggered terraces and urban gardens were deployed and where there was an attempt to harmonize brutalist housing with their street-level context. Her buildings often stray from Brutalism’s stylistic norm to create bright, colorful, and lively spaces with big windows and hospitable spaces. Through sensitive gestures, they engage with the people and the city and have since become an inspiration and a model for what generous housing truly entails.
In 1969 Gailhouste became the chief architect in the urban renewal of the Ivry-sur-Seine suburbs located in south-eastern Paris. The initiative was a response to the pressing postwar necessity of housing in Paris. the plan that Gailhoustet devised for the area was a rejection of large complexes and instead an assortment of various building types, separated by open spaces. The result was a cohesive urban setting but with eclectic diversity in the spatial configuration, still inhabited today. Gailhoustet would go on to leave her mark in Paris’ other suburbs, drawing on in Aubervilliers, Saint-Denis, and Villejuif the knowledge and experience gained in the design of Ivry-sur-Seine, in addition to the two urban renewal plans for Reunion Island.
Renée Gailhoustet’s achievements reach far beyond what is produced as social or affordable housing anywhere today. Her work has a strong social commitment that brings together generosity, beauty, ecology, and inclusivity.- Farshid Moussavi RA, Chair of the 2022 Royal Academy Architecture Awards Jury.
For her pioneering work in creating architecture as a social and cultural practice, for the generosity and sensibility with which she approached social housing, and for the uniqueness of her architectural forms, Renée Gailhoustet will undoubtedly be long remembered.
