Though photographs of the Brutalist Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine regularly circulate on Instagram, its plant-covered pyramidal apartment complexes still wowing in their 1970s audacity, few know the name of the woman who made it all possible. Renée Gailhoustet, who died on January 4 in her Ivry home at the age of 93, was municipal architect from the 1960s to the 1980s, overseeing the radical transformation of the Communist borough, whose center was entirely redeveloped under her watch. Besides being one of the few female architects to make a significant career in what was then an all-boys profession, Gailhoustet was equally atypical in her decision to focus almost exclusively on collective social housing. Yet more unusually, she even lived in two of her own projects.
Born in Oran, then part of French Algeria, in 1929, Gailhoustet was in no way predestined for architecture. In 1947, she moved to the metropole to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and, only after rejecting a career in teaching, enrolled at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, in 1952. There she joined the external architecture atelier run by Marcel Lods, André Hermant, and the engineer Henri Trezzini, which was not only one of the few to accept women but offered a more modern teaching program than the still-very-traditional in-house ateliers. Among her fellow students, Jean Renaudie (1925–81) would become a significant presence in her life, not least as her romantic partner (though never married, the couple had two children, in 1961 and 1968), as well as a fellow militant in the French Communist Party, which Gailhoustet had joined while at the Sorbonne.
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