Renée Gailhoustet: A Thousand and One Ways of Living

The celebrated French architect Renée Gailhoustet (1929–2023) created pioneering masterplans and social housing projects in the Parisian suburbs. Rejecting rigid typologies and modernist ideals of uniformity and standardisation, she designed collective yet noble and bespoke housing that featured a characteristic generosity of space and use of raised terraces. In the words of the former French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak, Gailhoustet’s architecture offers ‘a thousand and one ways of inhabiting our world’.

Building on work completed during the Royal Academy of Arts 2023 Residency, architect, NVBL director and AA Intermediate 15 unit tutor Nichola Barrington-Leach reflects on Gailhoustet's work in a 1:1 scale installation of a series of apartment floorplans from Gailhoustet’s Le Liégat housing project in Ivry-sur-Seine. The exhibition brings together additional drawings, spatial study models by NVBL, as well as photographs by Sacha Trouiller and Valerie Sadoun. Together, they invite us to consider how Gailhoustet’s ambitious, generous and adaptable buildings created unique places to live, and embody principles for designing and living that we can learn from today.

The exhibition precedes the release of Renée Gailhoustet, a new book edited by Nichola Barrington-Leach and published by AA Publications, which brings together several voices to celebrate Gailhoustet's architecture.
 

Image: Le Liégat, Ivry-sur-Seine, Sacha Trouiller / NVBL Architects