French Architect Odile Decq Encourages Entrepreneurship in Architecture and its Teaching

I recently came across this article about French Architect Odile Decq that resonates deeply with me.

She believes that “Architects have to bring back to them the control of everything in the [built] environment,”. In her interview with urbanNext earlier this year, the pioneering architect, who introduced bold new forms and technical innovations to the French architecture scene in the early 1990s, spoke on what she believes will be an expanded role for achitects in the future, not limited to “building buildings”, but having a more interdisciplinary approach that would see them more involved in companies, cities and communities.

IMAGE COURTESY ARCHITECTUUL

To further promote and embed this ideology, Decq launched the Confluence Institute, School of Architecture in Lyon, France. A school seeking to encourage architects to imagine themselves less as designers, and more as entrepreneurs who will be “developing by themselves a project and offering that to the society … not only waiting for clients … to ask [them] something.”

CONFLUENCE INSTITUTE IN LYON, PARIS

“…today we have to rethink, totally, education in architecture … Architecture education is too much now just a professional study.”

ODILE DECQ

Its great to see such an initiative taking hold in Europe, and its sets a good precedence for how architecture should be taught as opposed to how it is taught, and resultantly how it can be practiced, an ideology similar to that of American Architect Jonathan Segal and a topic we have previously dealt with on livin spaces. Here’s hoping more of such begins to take shape in Africa and leads to a true transformation of our built environment. You can read the full article on architizer.

 
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