Manuelle Gautrand
Manuelle Gautrand
FRANCE - Before broaching the subject of a feminine architecture, one might observe that in France there are more women among architects than among commissioning clients or in the construction industry. Today, in a sector that is 'fairly macho', three generations of women architects coexist: the militant pioneers who sacrificed their private life to the job, the fighters who tried to combine the two, and the younger women who often work in teams or as part of a couple. Manuelle Gautrand is something of a special case, playing all by herself in the big boys' playground.
Biography
Born in 1961, Manuelle Gautrand set up her own practice in Lyon in 1991, moving to Paris two years later. She lectured at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture and the Paris-Val-de-Seine School of Architecture between 2000 and 2003. She currently teaches in architectural workshops held throughout Europe and is a consultant to, among others, the education authority in Grenoble and the Mission interministérielle pour la qualité des constructions publiques. In 2005, Gautrand was elected as a statutory member of the French Architecture Academy.
Profile
Manuelle Gautrand: Even though it happens less and less, I have been interviewed more as a woman than about my architecture. By now, I'd like to be seen not as a woman but as an architect.
Sophie Roulet: So for you there is no such thing as a feminine architecture?
MG: No, I don't think so. It's primarily our culture, our life journey and our own personality, more than being a man or a woman, that influences us. Just as the country we come from, our imagination and our sources of inspiration are defining, because architecture is a discipline at the crossroads of many paths.
SR: Yet how can one analyse architecture separately from the person who produces it?
MG: It's true that the gaze, the personality of the architect is important, but whether man or woman, only the result matters.
Clients are not going to commission an important project from someone who does not have a powerful charisma, who cannot charm them. This is a profession in which the power of conviction, the power of persuasion is fundamental, and I have that, just as a man may have it. I am capable of frenetic, limitless passion, of boundless tenacity in defending my project in front of a client.
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