Manuelle Gautrand Architecture

MANUELLE GAUTRAND ARCHITECTURE is a Parisian based architecture firm founded by Manuelle Gautrand in 1991.

Manuelle Gautrand is the principal architect and director of the agency. Marc Blaising, partner, financial and administrative director has been involved in the general management of the agency since 1992.

The team of over 15 architects develops projects for public contracting authorities as well as private firms both in France and abroad. Under the leadership of Manuelle Gautrand, each architect-project manager is in charge of a project.

The two-level 500 sqm office is located in the Bastille neighborhood of Paris.

The firm’s poetic architecture embraces the endless variety of forms and colors, using the most contemporary methods of planning in a variety of areas ranging from cultural facilities to residential, commercial and office buildings.

To “Re-enchant the City” and thus to bring emotion, to reinvent, to renew, to innovate and to propose the unexpected answers, to be bold and plural are the founding principles of the architecture of Manuelle Gautrand.
The architecture, her architecture is what poetry was to Saint John Perse: “the luxury of being unaccustomed”. At the core of the process of creativity lies the approach to each new project through the spirit of “blank page”, with no à priori. Yet all her projects express a specific relationship to the site: a desire to revive it and enchant; a deep commitment to working on the programs entrusted to the firm, make them even more efficient, more malleable and more unexpected…
The project must each time become a unique and symbolic encounter between the site and the program.

Strategies

In her approach to architecture, Manuelle Gautrand explores the crisis of modernity, in which ‘our rich and sated industrialised society is torn between extreme modernity and a reactionary return to the past’. Manuelle Gautrand has devised pairs of opposites to address this threat: Her thought is on the side of disobedience, boldness and plurality as remedies against replication -these things are the founding elements of her architecture and her approach to programmes. The lesson contained in these remedies are summed up in a number of her remarks: if ‘innovation is always based on disobedience’, we should ‘mark the change by our way of representing our civilisation’, ‘work within discrepancies’, take ‘the risk of building’ and test ‘our emotions and desires to the utmost!’.

To bring people into this world and – more important still – to open it up to them, Manuelle Gautrand employs different strategies, which are themselves divergent.

In fact, it is their divergence that suits them to the function of unmasking and it is what makes her projects very different one from the other.

This diversity also derives from the attention she brings to bear on programmes, on the many and varied ways she appropriates and interprets briefs in order to work.

This process of analysis, interpretation and even deformation of the programme, which in all her projects precedes any aesthetic choice, leads her to deploy her strategies.

These different strategies are all based on figures proper to Manuelle Gautrand, and which constitute her highly personal aesthetic discourse.

(Extract of a critic text by Alice Laguarda)