Odile DECQ / Architecture Thinking - online lecture

Online meeting with the significant French architect Odile Decq, organized by Athabasca University (AU) and its partners, can be shared on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, at 5:00 PM Central European Time after registering at this ZOOM address.

The university was established in 1970 and is the first Canadian university specializing in distance education due to its geographical location, and is part of a group of four comprehensive academic and research universities in the province of Alberta.

This lecture could be included in the program of the 12th International Festival of Architecture, Design, and Art ARCHIKULTURA 2020 thanks to the kind permission of Odile Decq, with whom the Architecture Cabinet has cooperated since 2017.

Odile DECQ (*1955) is an internationally recognized and often awarded architect, urban planner, and academic educator. She advocates an unwavering stance in the search for solutions, and her early work was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1996. The originality of her creations encompasses not only a remarkable creative handwriting, innovative attitudes, and an tireless search process but Odile Decq's works can primarily be described as the materialization of universal space, into which she projects her rich experiences in urban planning, architecture, design, and art. Her multidisciplinary approach was, among other accolades, honored in 2016 with the “Jane Drew Prize,” and in 2017 she received the international award from Architizer, the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Since 1992, she has served as a professor at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, and in 2007 she was appointed to lead the department of architecture. She left in 2012 to build her own school from scratch, the Institut Confluence for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Lyon, which she ultimately relocated last year to the center of Paris for better accessibility.

The school upholds a simple yet meaningfully profound credo that “Architecture should not be limited to technical or specialized education,” and as the dean of this educational institution, she additionally states:
On the contrary, architecture is a discipline that must open itself to the world. It is a vision and the ability to act. And there is no doubt that today we must turn to healthy sources of humanism. CONFLUENCE thus integrates not only new social visions but also conceptions of society itself and new methods and tools related to communication, and with such an approach to creation that allows students to act and move in the world of tomorrow.

The cooperation with Odile Decq was established by the Architecture Cabinet in 2017, resulting in an exhibition installation called Horizons, which was presented for the first time not only to the public in Ostrava in April 2018 at the local House of Art, as part of the 10th International Festival of Architecture, Design, and Art ARCHIKULTURA 2018. Interestingly, during the re-run of the exhibition at the Gallery of the National Technical Library in Prague, two of her additional presentations were simultaneously on view as part of the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture, at the Palazzo Bembo and in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini exhibition area.
At the close of that ongoing biennale, the European Cultural Centre (ECC) awarded the prestigious European Cultural Centre Award 2018 to Odile Decq from the group of nominated creators, which included Peter Eisenman (USA), Odile Decq (FRA), Daniel Libeskind (POL/USA), Curt Fentress (USA), Moshe Safdie (CAN), Kengo Kuma (JPN), and Nikken Sekkei (JPN).
Currently, this remarkable architect chairs the jury for the highly regarded RIBA International Prize, where, together with Es Devlin, Jeanne Gang, Rossana Hu, and Gustavo Utrabo, she is expected to decide on the winner of this category of the exhibition, regularly organized by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), by the end of November this year.