“HABITER EST UNE AFFAIRE PRIVÉE”:
RETURN TO RENÉE GAILHOUSTET

In January of this year a core figure of contemporary architecture passed away. For the French panorama, but not only that, Renée

Gailhoustet represented a stubborn voice, an extraordinary one

in a profuse commitment to architectural practice founded on

the need to develop a critical and sociopolitical discourse on

collective suburban realities. Gailhoustet was the protagonist of

unanimous public recognition, albeit in certain respects belated,

in the first decade of the 2000s, with the architect by then in her

eighties: suffice it to recall, to this regard, several illustrious awards

and honors that the architect won, including the Prize of Women

Architects, the much-aspired to title of Commandeur de l’ordre des

Arts et des Lettres in 2017, the Gold Medal of Honor awarded by the

Académie d’Architecture in 2018, and, lastly, the attribution of the

prestigious Grand prix national de l’architecture from the French

Minister of Culture in 2022. Nonetheless, before this essential

series of acknowledgements, Gailhoustet’s career had begun, many

years before, in the vibrant Paris of the first quarter of the 1960s.

Bénédicte Chaljub wrote extensively about her, reconstructing an

important profile of Gailhoustet’s biography and output through

beautifully written articles, essays, and an exhaustive, recently

published monograph. Renée Gailhoustet was born on September

15, 1929 in Orano, the nerve center of northwestern Algeria and the

outpost of the independence movements that reached a peak in

July 1962 with the end of French colonialization that had begun in

the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Numerous episodes are

contained in the architect’s biography that have been told by her

interpreters and should be recalled here. First, her education must be mentioned, exquisitely interdisciplinary and particularly advanced

for that time in history. When she moved to the French capital in

1947, at the age of eighteen, Gailhoustet did not immediately embark

on architecture, but at first enrolled in a philosophy course under

the mentorship of Gaston Bachelard, at the Sorbonne. This took

place in the early 1950s, in the heart of the post-Second World War

period. To this regard, we must not underestimate the depth and

significance of this humanistic education in Gailhoustet’s opus, an

output whose highly pioneering contribution risked being mitigated

where the structurally ‘individual’ dimension was not highlighted.

She would decide to go into architecture a few years later, in 1952,

with her enrollment at the legendary École des Beaux-Arts in Paris,

a lively hub for the configuration of French artistic experimentation

throughout the twentieth century. In the city young Gailhoustet’s

trajectory began under the mastery of Marcel Lods, a multifaceted

French architect and urbanist, in addition to being an important

exponent of Rationalist European culture. In the aftermath of the

Second World War, Lods represented one of the most committed

interpreters, from a civil and theoretical point of view, in dealing

with housing issues in the aftermath of the war. This was witnessed to in numerous articles that appeared in the pages of the monthly

L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, a famous trade magazine founded in

1930 by André Bloc as a ‘meeting-place’ for Modernist thinking.

And so, while as early as 1935 Lods signed off a weighty proposal

dedicated to the perfectionnement de l’habitation en France, in

1960 a clearer intervention would be signed by him together with

Thomas Hawk Creighton (also an architect, and the editor of the

American magazine Progressive Architecture) emblematically titled

Critique de l’architecture contemporaine en Europe. It was in this

context that Gailhoustet’s conception of the practice of architecture,

that of one of the first women in France to open her own studio,

in 1964, probably took shape. The decades-long building site for

the town-planning scheme of Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburban town

just a few kilometers from Paris and the symbol of the French

Communist Party, the sponsor of the same plan being the mayor

Georges Marrane, represented the first urban planning project that

saw the participation of Gailhoustet under the guidance of Roland

Dubrulle, the architect and project manager of it all. This was a

crucial project and one that was extensively discussed, destined to

become a pivotal document of social housing in Europe in the 1960s. It was there that, together with Jean Renaudie, the complex Cité Spinoza

came to light, made up of around eighty housing units (and not in the

form of the duplex), together with the iconic group known as Étoiles on

Avenue Georges-Gosnat. Sanctioning an ideological divergence vis-àvis

the Brutalism of Lecorbusierian inspiration, the complex rose up like a

sort of Post-Cubist polyhedron whose pyramidal volumes are intersected

by the places of public and private passage, hallways, ramps, and

projections in reinforced concrete: in this maze of basic shapes, the

connection at the street level and the terracing of the small gardens

defines a functional, dynamic, and multiple ecosystem, although distant

from the more widespread aggregati a stecca. In the same direction, just

to mention a few sites of the over two thousand housing units signed off by Gailhoustet, are the complexes Le Liégat in Ivry (1971–82) and La Maladrerie in Aubervilliers (1975- 1985). There were numerous other projects as well. To conclude this short essay, it might be helpful to recall some of Gailhoustet’s

reflections formulated in the famous book Eloge du logement,

published by Massimo Riposati in 1993. In the concise foreword to

the monograph, filled with photographs and cuttings that briefly

describe the projects that have succeeded one another in over

twenty years of work, Gailhoustet summed up the key themes of

her thinking. In noting how the theme of “l’habitat” had constituted

“l’essentiel de mon travaille,” the architect took her distance

from the serial and serializing model of the “cellules” to redeem

the humanistic and even emotional architecture dedicated to the

community: Celles de l’expression personnelle et du rapport à autrui,

celles de l’appréhension la plus intime, la plus prégnante de l’espace

et de la lumière.” Talking about Renée Gailhoustet today means

accepting the urgency of a discourse that sees anthropomorphism

as the key to a democratic, transcultural, and interspecific plan, one

that conceives the individual, the endless combination of differences,

as the inhabitant of history and, above all, of histories.