In post-war Paris, housing could be really radical
Gailhoustet still lives in her self-designed apartment and studio at Le Liégat, Ivry – a scheme begun in 1971 and completed in 1986. The stepped concrete terraces with deep apartments pushing back towards the overspilling terraces and patios, with shrubs and trees intervening, were utterly at odds with the norms of 1970s housing. The contemporary effect, now mature, resembles those futile CGIs so beloved of architects struggling to assert their green credentials to credulous clients. At Ivry, the astonishing intricacy of the plan, the spatial verve and generosity, is best understood when caught by aerial photography.
Internally, there is spatial generosity too, though often expressed vertically. Immensely high ceilings, doubling the heights of modestly sized, oddly shaped rooms, are a frequent feature, as are the eccentrically scattered groups of differently sized windows and angled walls – polygonal rather than rectilinear forms. The tenants discovered that they could use rooms as they wished, taking the inside to the outside, using them in daytime or night-time according to need. Behind this fluidity lay the architects’ understanding of the realities of modern urban society and their belief that shifting demo- graphics can and must be reflected within architecture. As master planner, and as a resident, Gailhoustet knew the local population and her neighbours. She and her team designed housing and amenities, as Moussavi said, that connect to ‘difference and autonomy as much as, even more than, for the nuclear family’.
A recent report from the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. points out that in strong contrast to most of its peers, most notably the UK and the United States, French central government policy ensures that social housing remains central to the ‘broader social safety net’. With that recognition comes substantial funding and hence fresh thinking: as Gailhoustet herself said in 2018, the private sector tends to be reticent, since with innovation comes financial risk.
On the discussion panel after the presentation of her award (in absentia, but with her daughter and other colleagues present), it was pointed out by the housing architect Peter Barber that Renée Gailhoustet achieved her results with freedoms allowed to architects that are the envy of her peers in rule-bound Britain. In 2021, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal won the most prestigious of all architectural prizes, the Pritzker, for their transformative work on several 1960s modernist blocks in Paris, Bordeaux and other cities, where they adroitly extended each floor with new ‘winter garden’ terraces and generous glazing, thus bringing more space and light into every apartment. Such masterstrokes in housing design, let alone redesign, do not come often or easily, but they richly deserve recognition when they do. Gailhoustet’s award, like theirs, is a marker of better ways, fresh ideas and social responsibilities, which all deserve our admiration.
From the November 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. More
