12 – 2020

Renée Gailhoustet

At a junction in the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine the career of a woman architect and the beginning of a new era in architecture condense. Here, next to four modernist high-rise buildings, one can find a terraced housing “mountain” with public functions on part of the ground floor. The star-shaped, jagged balconies, the net of routes across the roofs and the Mediterranean squares celebrate a farewell to the modern era of architecture and introduce an individuality in social housing that has never been achieved again. Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie carried out this experiment between the 1960s and 1980s.