About this talk

Running time: 20 minutes

Odile Decq first came to prominence in 1990 with the completion of Banque Populaire de L'Ouest in Rennes, designed with her late husband and partner Benoît Cornette. In recent years, she has completed the extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2010), The Phantom Restaurant at the Opéra Garnier in Paris (2011), FRAC Bretagne Contemporary Art Museum in Rennes (2012), the renovation of Antti Lovag's bubble house Maison Bernard in France (2016) and Le Cargo office space for tech start-ups in Paris (2016). In 2016, she was awarded the Jane Drew prize for women in architecture.

In this talk, Decq discusses her Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum in Nanjing China (2014). Inspired by the way bondage accentuates the curves of the female body, she designed a building that responds to and exaggerates the existing landscape with a central atrium that varies floor to floor to challenge the prescriptive circulation of traditional museums.

Decq also spoke to us about setting up her influential Confluence Institute (see The Confluence Institute: Rethinking Architectural Education), which offers a radical alternative to conventional architectural education.

Recorded at Studio Odile Decq in Paris, France. August 2017.