About this talk

Running time: 17 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 describes setting up her own school of architecture in 2012, the Confluence Institute, housed in a converted railway building in Lyon. With its emphasis on making, the school offers a radical alternative to conventional architectural education.

Decq has also worked in China, which she discussed with us in Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark, which gives a fascinating insight into her architectural philosophy.

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