Renée Gailhoustet’s typological atlas: an architectural "Alphabet"

Abstract

When reading into the underlying thinking of every architectural project, there are references that, together with the motivation behind the making of all decisions, give rise to the contextual framework of the project for its critique. Renée Gailhoustet (1929-...) is an architect whose professional work, carried out between 1961 and 1995, synthesized political and social interests through typological experimentation, mainly in the field of collective housing. In her projects in urban peripheries, she tested architectural mechanisms that raised the questioning of the urban model emerged with the institutionalization of the functionalist postulates of the Athens Charter. In this article we will analyze the transition of her typological discourse in order to understand her text entitled "Alphabet" with which she formed a kind of "doxa" or vade mecum. The selected terms, in alphabetical order, specified her interests, which materialized as constants in her work, and intellectual coordinates which were coincident with those of other architects of her generation. The objective will be to demonstrate how the multi-directionality of these anthropological and architectural meanings modeled a theoretical corpus that, complemented by her philosophy studies and by her political commitment, geared her proposals towards the improvement of social conditions for coexistence and the rapport between the city and its people.