Renée Gailhoustet

Renée Gailhoustet (; 15 September 1929 – 4 January 2023) was a French architect known for her contribution to social housing in the Paris suburbs. She was one of the few female architects of her generation and one of the few prominent architects to build a career in the field of social housing.

Early life Gailhoustet was born in Oran, French Algeria on 15 September 1929. She was the daughter of Maurice Gailhoustet, accountant and then deputy director of the newspaper L'Écho d'Oran. She obtained her architecture diploma in 1961. It was there that she met Jean Renaudie, who was later to a become a close associate in many of her architectural projects. She was an activist in the Young Communists movement while at university and decided to go into architecture out of political conviction.

Career In 1962 she joined Roland Dubrulle's firm where she worked on plans for renovation of the centre of Ivry-sur-Seine, eventually becoming the chief architect together with Jean Renaudie. In 1968, the Raspail Tower was completed. She then designed the Lénine, Casanova and Jeanne Hachette towers, as well as the Spinoza estate. She followed up with the Liégat (where she lived for many years), which is a large complex combining 140 units of social housing and business premises, furnished with vegetated terraces and planted patios. – some commentators assert that Renaudie was her ‘mentor’, while others see a tendency, in the past, to give sole credit to Renaudie for projects that they worked on as equal partners. (e.g. as set forth in the Athens Charter).

In her projects, Gailhoustet sought to instill the pleasure of inhabiting a place (le plaisir d'habiter) – quality of life was central to her mission.

The residences she created were unconventional and non-standardized. Gailhoustet died on 4 January 2023, at the age of 93, in the Liégat, Ivry-sur-Seine.

In her elegy for Gailhoustet, the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Lalak, stated:By choosing to organise lived space along diversified, varied, surprising and complex paths – like life itself – Renée Gailhoustet has shown us that there are a thousand and one ways of inhabiting our world and that the walls of dwellings can serve more to liberate us than to lock us up. 2019 : Berlin Art Prize (Großer Kunstpreis Berlin) 2022 : Royal Academy of Arts, Architecture Prize 2022 : Grand prix national de l'architecture (GPNA, a prize awarded by the French Ministry of Culture) 2022 : Raspail tower is added to the list of Monuments historiques by the French Ministry of Culture