The Architectural Review calls Odile Decq “a creative powerhouse, spirited breaker of rules and advocate of equality.” She’s an award-winning French architect, urban planner, and academic who recently started her own architecture school. In addition to speaking at the Foundation Lunch on May 31, Odile will attend the College of Fellows Convocation, also on May 31, where she will be inducted as an Honorary Fellow. Founder of the Paris firm, Studio Odile Decq, her portfolio ranges from art galleries and museums to social housing and infrastructure. Notable projects include the Banque Populaire de l'Ouest in Rennes, the Cargo office building in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and the Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum in Nanjing, China. In 2016, the Architectural Review awarded her the Jane Drew Prize for promoting women in architecture. In 1996, she received the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennial. Odile taught at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris from 1992 to 2007, before becoming head of the school from 2007 to 2012, and she has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University in New York, Bartlett in London, and Kunstakademie in Vienna and Düsseldorf. In 2014, she established an international school in Lyon called the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture. “I have had a long, friendly relationship with Canadian architecture since my first visit in the early 1990s,” she says. “Being from Brittany in France, I have always been looking over the horizon line of the Atlantic Ocean towards the Canadian coast.” |