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Social Housing: Realising the Ideal ‘Renée Gailhoustet: A Thousand and One Ways of Living’

photographed by
Philip Dale Nogare (unless otherwise indicated)
materials provided by
NVLM Architects

SPACE April 2026 (No. 701) 

 

Exhibition views of ‘Renée Gailhoustet: A Thousand and One Ways of Living’​ 

 

 

AA Front Members’ Room and AA Bar in AA School

Jan. 16 ‒ Mar. 21, 2026​ 

 

 

interview Nichola Barrington-Leach Principal, NVLM Architects × Kim Bokyoung  ​

 

 

Most of us, in Korea, live within the same apartment floor plan. The social housing in the French suburbs designed by Renée Gailhoustet (1929 ‒ 2023) is atypical. Having designed over 2,000 social housing units in the Paris suburbs, Gailhoustet chose a different path when others opted for repetition ‒ believing that just as each family is unique, so too should each dwelling be ‒ and went on to design some 1,500 distinct unit types. We sat down with the exhibition’s curator, Nicolas Barrington-Leach (Principal, NVLM Architects), to discuss her long-overlooked body of work and the exhibition that brings its diversity to light.​

 

 

Kim Bokyoung (Kim): What first drew you to Renée Gailhoustet? I understand that you studied her work during a residency programme.
Nichola Barrington-Leach (Barrington-Leach): Yes, the residency was the starting point. The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) gave her the 2022 Royal Academy Architecture Prize and set up a residency programme in her name, which we won in 2023. Over a six-week period in Paris, I discovered her work, as I didn’t know it at all before. She is not widely-known, and certainly not in the U.K. In July and August, for about a month and a half, as a practice, we spent a great deal of time with her work. When the RA awarded her the prize in January 2023, she couldn’t come to London to receive it in person because she was too ill. Sadly, she passed away just before our time in Paris, so I never got to meet her.​

 

 

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Exhibition views of ‘Renée Gailhoustet: A Thousand and One Ways of Living’​​

 

 

Kim: Gailhoustet completed her architecture degree at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1961, and the following year joined the office of Roland Dubrulle, who was then the chief architect of Ivry-sur-Seine. Just two years after graduating, she was handed the masterplan for the entire Ivry-sur-Seine district—responsible for designing a city in her late twenties. The broader historical context in France at the time, which made this possible, seems equally important here.​

Barrington-Leach: In the Ivry-sur-Seine’s masterplan...

 
*You can see more information on the SPACE No. April (2026).
*Subscribers can browse through E-Magazine right now. >> Available Here

Nichola Barrington-Leach
Nichola Barrington-Leach is a London-based architect (ARB) and principal of NVLM Architects. Studied architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, the AA School, and the University of Westminster, she maintains a research-based practice alongside teaching architecture at the AA School, Kingston School of Arts and mentoring at the Royal College of Art.
EXHIBITION ‘Renée Gailhoustet: A Thousand and One Ways of Living’ Nichola Barrington-Leach NVBL AA School Renée Gailhoustet social housing HLM Le Liégat Ivry-sur-Seine France banlieue rouge communism
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