“Black is a hard drug”
Odile Decq
Architect Odile Decq in her black Mini Cooper, Paris, 2014
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Text
ANDREW AYERS
Portrait
JuERgEN TEllER
According to I.M. Pei, architects don’t
really know what they’re doing until
they reach 60. Which means that
58-year-old odile decq is rather precocious, since she has already entered a
mature phase of her career with large,
complex projects such as the Museo
d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO, 2001–10), the FRAC Bretagne in
Rennes (2004–12), the just-completed
Pavillon 8 in Lyon (2005–14), and the
forthcoming Museum of Homo Erectus
in Tangshan, China. Diverse and multifaceted, Decq’s practice includes everything from small household objects (for
companies like Laguiole and Alessi) to
interiors, furniture, and lighting (including pieces for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris) to full-scale urban design.
Neither “iconic” nor showy photogenic,
her architecture is based on the experience of the body moving through space
as well as in attention to detail, both visual and behavioral. There is no obsessive
signature “style” – her buildings are not
riffs on one theme, and they move from
the Cartesian to the fluid to the geometric as the briefs and her instincts demand.
Her enemies are symmetry (“Human beings aren’t symmetrical. It’s an abstraction that doesn’t interest me!”), inauthentic use of materials, conventional
thinking, and boredom. She believes in
the promenade architecturale, in telling a
story, in architecture as discovery, both
for those who enter her buildings and
for herself as a practitioner investigating
her craft. Architect and avant-gardist
Peter Cook, who knows Decq well, has
said of her:
“In all my travels, and at all the points
in a constantly unraveling web of architectural vitality, I can rarely match
the Decq phenomenon … a mean
composer of plans and even meaner
delineator of the built carcass and
very clear about it … a true pedagogue, with both an overview of what
architectural education is really about
plus the added advantage of being
able to inspire those around her …
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To a former spotty English youth
such as myself who had gazed wistfully at pictures of Juliette Greco,
[my] first sighting [of Decq] sustained [her] myth. If anything, I was
reminded of another first sighting –
that of the Smithsons, more than 20
years before: visions in silver plastic,
but sustained by a string of provocative ideas.”
Born and raised in the small town of
Laval, Brittany, Decq studied architecture first in Rennes and then in Paris,
adding urbanism to her repertoire at Sciences Po. She opened her office after
graduating, and her early years in practice, in partnership with her husband,
Benoît Cornette (who was tragically
killed in a car accident in 1998), were a
time of experimentation, little money,
and finding her way both professionally
and artistically. Success came suddenly,
at the beginning of the 1990s, with the
headquarters of the Banque Populaire de
l’Ouest in Rennes followed by a Golden
Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale
in 1996. Since then, despite the pain of
Cornette’s absence, she has gone from
strength to strength, her projects constantly growing in size, scope, complexity, and daring. For Claude Parent, doyen of the French architectural scene,
Decq’s design for the MACRO was a
“petit chef d’oeuvre,” a “bijou of insertion” that, “without ever falling into
mannerism” or sacrificing its own constructive logic, integrated itself perfectly
into its environment.
As well as admiring the force of her
architecture, Parent was seduced by
Decq’s strength of personality, her refusal to recognize limits, her unshakeable
will. Had she not become an architect,
he concluded, she would have been a
sailor, “striking across the waves, tearing
her sails, subjugating the sea.” Seattlebased architect Peter Pran describes her
work as “always a surprise. You do not
know what she will create next; she does
not repeat herself … What sets her work
and work method apart is how she asks
questions and analyzes all issues pertaining to architecture and our architectural
culture: she undermines the conventional and subverts it.” It’s a sentiment with
which French critic and historian Michel
Vernes entirely concurs: “The work of this
exceptional architect has a constant tendency to make us forget the customary
canons of beauty: with her head on her
shoulders and a sturdy heart, she defies
the present in the name of the future.”
Strength and tenacity are qualities required in any architect, but for a woman
in the male-dominated profession, they
are even more necessary. At the end of
2013, after practicing for 35 years, Decq
was named French Female Architect of
the Year – a rather delicious irony given
that the profession’s legendary machisme
very nearly stopped her taking up the Tsquare at all. “To begin with,” she says,
“I didn’t consider architecture because I
thought it wasn’t possible for a girl.”
“My father was absolutely certain
that architecture wasn’t for girls, and
at the time there were very few
woman architects, so the question
never even came up. I wanted to do
something in the arts – a drawing
teacher had introduced me to architecture, the decorative arts, urbanism, and so on – and I also had a
girlfriend who’d gone to study art
history in Rennes, so I decided to follow her. In Rennes I got to know
some of the architecture students
and went to visit the architecture
school to see what they were doing.
One day I asked, ‘But are there girls
who are doing architecture too? Is it
possible?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ they replied, ‘you
can sit the entrance exam if you like.’
So I sat the exam and passed it. Afterwards I went home to tell my parents. My father’s reaction was: ‘But
it’s not possible for girls, there aren’t
any girls in architecture!’ And to
make me understand he invited an
architect home for lunch, a Parisian
who came to Laval from time to time.
So this gentleman came, because of
course it was a man, and at the end
of the meal he turned to me and said,
‘So my petite demoiselle’ – that was
really how he spoke – ‘I hear you
want to be an architect. What do
you want to build?’ And I replied,
without really thinking, ‘A theater!’
He looked rather surprised and then
turned to my parents and said, ‘Listen, I’ll tell you one thing. We don’t
know if she’ll do a theater or not, but
it’s great that young girls today are
interested in architecture, because
with their common sense they’ll be
very good at designing kitchen cupboards and work surfaces.’ Back in
Rennes I said to myself that since I
was so endowed with common
sense, I would use it for everything
but kitchens and cupboards!”
Indeed, in Decq’s apartment, which she
has entirely remodeled, the kitchen still
isn’t finished and probably never will be.
(To get water for cooking she has to use
the bathroom faucet; she tells guests
she’s “going to the well.”) She also hasn’t
yet had the opportunity to build a theater, but “it doesn’t really matter. I don’t
have any goals as to what I absolutely
want to build. Each time an opportunity
arises for something I’ve never done before, I’m interested in it on principle.
What excites me is discovery, setting out
on an adventure and seeing where it will
take me.” This explains the great diversity of her oeuvre: housing (both apartment buildings and individual residences), museums and galleries, restaurants,
transportation facilities, university buildings, offices, temporary pavilions, and
even a yacht. Contrary to standard practice in France, where concrete has reigned
supreme for the last century, Decq is far
more interested in glass and steel, something she discovered in London, though
it was initially more the music scene that
attracted her.
“In the 1980s we [Decq and Cornette] spent every weekend in London, because we were passionate
about the music scene. We knew
loads of groups and had tons of
friends there. So we spent our weekends at concerts and on the Kings
Road, like everyone else, but on Sundays we went to the Isle of Dogs,
which was being redeveloped at the
time – Canary Wharf and all that.
That’s how we discovered metal construction. And that’s why, for our
first big project in 1988, the Banque
Populaire de l’Ouest in Rennes, we
proposed a metal-framed building,
something that had never been done
in France for an office building. Never! It was only afterwards that we
found this out. For us, having seen
tons of metal-framed buildings, it
seemed totally normal. We knew
every little detail of metal construction and knew how to design them.”
Although later Decq admitted that this
wasn’t quite the case.
“Once we’d won the competition for
the Banque Populaire, we said to
ourselves, ‘How are we going to
build it?’ We didn’t know an engineer
capable of doing it with us. Peter
Terrell, an Englishman who’d just
opened his engineering firm in Paris,
suggested we talk to Peter Rice.’”
That’s the legendary Peter Rice of RFR
(Rice Francis Ritchie), who invented the
suspended, cable-tensed glazing that has
become so ubiquitous today. Despite her
reservations that Rice wouldn’t be interested in working with such a young,
small firm, Decq, never lacking in mettle,
went to see him.
“I showed him my project and he
said, ‘What interests me is the façade.
How are you going to get light
through it?’ And we talked about
light, and about space, and not at all
about structure, which was interesting. And he agreed to work with us.”
Inaugurated in 1990, the Banque Populaire brought Decq instant recognition
and effectively launched the firm’s career.
If it now seems very much of its era – or
something of an œuvre de jeunesse – it
demonstrates all its architect’s pluck
with a dramatic plan that allows for a
fetishistic orgy of cable-tensed steel and
glass running along 120 meters of main
façade. Since then, Decq’s preference for
metallic construction has never waned.
“I don’t like concrete. When you go
on site, it’s dusty and dirty! [Laughs.]
No, it’s not just that. Concrete is less
precise – I prefer steel. I prefer the
articulation, the construction, the
structure. I prefer to imagine the
construction and the manner of construction at the same time as I imagine the space, which is something
you don’t do with concrete. With
metal-framed buildings you have to
think about the construction itself,
and not just draw plans that you
give to the engineer who makes sure
the concrete comes down in the
right place. When you’re working
with a metal frame, the advantage is
that you design it yourself, and you
think in terms of both structure and
space simultaneously – the two are
indivisible.”
Ever since the first flowering of iron and
steel structures in the 19th century, glass
has been their handmaiden, from early
railway stations with their glazed roofs
to the thousands of panes that twinkled
on London’s Crystal Palace (1851). And
for Decq, it’s the stuff of the future.
“Glass is by far the most high-performance material today, the one that’s
being constantly reinvented with new
technology, the one you can work
with the most. I like the materiality
of glass. I like the freedom you have
with it and the freedom of space you
can give with glass.”
Having commissioned all-glass houses
from her, many of Decq’s clients agree.
“Right now I’m doing three houses
in Brittany for three Englishmen
who’ve asked me to do them entirely
in glass – there isn’t a single partition
that isn’t in glass! And for the first of
the houses, the client is saying that
perhaps the intermediary floor and
also the staircase should be in glass.
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“The worsT
misTake is accepTing
The sTar sysTem
or wanTing To be
a parT of iT. iT’s
idioTic, monsTrous.
i don’T wanT To
become a big prac­
Tice. i don’T wanT
To have a huge
office. i don’T wanT
a sTaff of 100.
i wanT To be able
To do my projecTs,
know all my pro­
jecTs, Their deTails,
be able To verify
everyThing myself
and be cerTain of
The qualiTy of whaT
i deliver. i feel
more like a crafTs­
person Than an
indusTrialisT.”
Banque Populaire de L’Ouest
Rennes, France
1990
Photos: Stephane Couturier
FRAC Bretagne
Rennes, France
2012
Photos: Roland Halbe
MACRO Contemporary Art Museum
Rome, Italy
2010
Photos: Georges Fessy & Luigi Filetici
Museum of Homo Erectus
Nanjing, China
2012–ongoing
130
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The gentleman in question has a disease that is causing his eyesight to
diminish progressively, so he needs
light to flood into his home. He’s an
industrialist who works with glass
and metal in London, and he’s building the house himself. It comprises
pivoted cuboid volumes entirely clad
in glass – black translucent glass so
that it diffuses the light but also protects you from it.”
Other projects in which glass has a prominent role are the Brittany Region’s contemporary art gallery (FRAC Bretagne)
and Pavillon 8, a mixed-use complex
housing an art foundation as well as the
headquarters of an events company. Both
buildings feature monumental glass-clad
boxes, and in both, as in the houses in
Brittany, the glass is tinted black.
Black, it turns out, is fundamental to
who Decq is. The cliché of the architect
clad from head to toe in the color arose
in the late 80s, but Decq’s penchant for
somber attire predates all that: it originated in her love affair with London and
the English music scene. Decq has no
qualms about doing the time warp again,
for she is never not decked out in full
goth garb: backcombed, anthracite tresses; Siouxsie eye shadow; black nails;
black lipstick. She even drives a black
Mini from the 1980s.
“Black is London. It’s rock, it’s music
– everything that happened just after
I graduated. I was platinum blonde
when I was a student in the 1970s –
blonde, blonde, blonde! Then I went
over to all black when I started to
understand that in England things
were blacker.”
The color of mourning?
“That’s what my father used to say!
And I would reply, ‘But no, it isn’t
about mourning. Priests aren’t in
mourning!’ [Laughs.] I tried to find
references he could understand. And
once I’d gone over to black, I could
never change, because once you’ve
fallen into it, you’re done for. You
can’t get out. Black is a hard drug. If
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I go into a clothes store and there
isn’t any black, I don’t even look. I
just walk out! Black is a fantastic
color: it absorbs. It’s a color that’s
neutral but strong, that stands out
while still being extremely elegant.
All the rebels were dressed in black,
all those who resisted, the anarchists,
the rockers.”
Slowly but surely, black has crept into
Decq’s buildings as well.
“It’s only recently that I’ve used
black in my buildings. Even back at
the time of the Banque Populaire,
clients would say – because I was always dressed in black – ‘You’re going to put black in the building!’ But
I never did because I didn’t want to
impose black on people. It started
with the MACRO, where it was
complicated to build in metal because of the stringent fire regulations
in Italy – while I managed to get steel
accepted for the roof, I was forced to
use concrete for some of the rest. In
the renderings, I’d made the concrete
the color of concrete, but then I
started trying out samples: white,
light gray, concrete gray, then a little
darker, and in the end I said, ‘Right,
let’s try black.’ When I saw it, I asked
for a bigger sample, and then a journalist who was there to interview me
said, ‘Go on, go for it! Do it in black!’
And so I said, ‘Okay, let’s do all the
walls in black.’ And once all the walls
were black, I said, ‘Let’s do everything in black!’ And I had everything
painted black, even the smoke detectors. And it looked fantastic.”
Now, red sets off the black in Decq’s
buildings: a beating heart of an auditorium in both the FRAC Centre and the
MACRO, vermilion underbelly and furnishings in the offices of Pavillon 8. Is
there something of Stendhal’s Le Rouge
et le Noir in all of this? Not at all, Decq
replies. It had never even occurred to
her; the combination was simply instinctive. And were she to analyze that instinct? “It’s an instinct, not a problem.
Why do you want me to analyze it?” she
laughs. But now, she says, her instinct is
guiding her towards something chromatically more radical:
“For a little while I’ve been asking
myself if I shouldn’t only do black
buildings from now on. It’s started,
but it could be even more radical. At
the same time I can sense that I’m
going to imprison myself in something that bores me, and I don’t like
it when things become obligatory.”
Surely she makes the rules so she can
break them? “Yes, but as I said earlier,
once you’re bitten by black you can’t go
back. It’s a hard drug. I’m trying to resist, but …”
Resistance, rebellion, revolt: these
are also fundamental traits of Decq’s
character. As a teenager, she admits, she
became “extremely difficult” and was
thrown out of every school in Laval.
When the events of May 1968 rocked
France, Decq’s parents had to literally
lock up their 12-year-old daughter in her
room to stop her from joining the protests. But this was when anarchy and rebellion were in fashion, as became clear
when Decq arrived in Paris to study at
UP6 (now the École nationale supérieure
d’architecture de Paris - La Villette), one
of the architecture schools founded in
France after the break-up of the beauxarts system in the wake of 1968.
“It was the school that had the most
students, and it was total chaos. Indeed our studies were practically
zero because we were permanently
on strike – on the teaching staff were
[Roland] Castro [a former Maoist
revolutionary], [Jean-Pierre] Le Dantec [another Maoist revolutionary],
and all those people who’d been in
involved in May 68. It really was a
total mess. We barely went to class.
In my fourth or fifth year I hardly
knew how to do anything – I was
asked to do an axonometric, but I’d
never learned how! I had to earn my
living at the time, and because we
were almost never in school I was
able to work [for the architectural
theorist Philippe Boudon]. In the
building where Boudon had his offices there was also [Alain] Sarfati’s
architecture firm, and I went to see a
girlfriend who worked for Sarfati and
got her to teach me how to do axonometrics. You had to have a lot of
character to get through UP6 and
make an education for yourself. But
when in Paris, in 1991 or 1992, there
was the exhibition of 40 architects
under 40, 60 percent of them came
from UP6, including Dominique Perrault and me. Because it was the
most messed-up school, you could
really learn things for yourself.”
Teaching has formed an integral part of
Decq’s practice for the past 25 years,
and she served five years as head of
Paris’s École Spéciale d’Architecture until 2012. Still, reconciling her own educational experience with today’s climate
has sometimes proven problematic.
“In France architectural education today has become much more like high
school. As director I felt very embarrassed sometimes when we had to
make students redo a whole year – I
found it absurd not to be able to let
them find their own ways and create
their own path as I had done. But I
couldn’t because we were operating
under a very strict pedagogical code,
the Bologna rules, and the education
ministry’s stipulations. But today’s
students are very different, too. They
want it to be more like high school.
They want to be taken care of.
Whereas that was absolutely the opposite of what I wanted – I wanted
my independence!”
Perhaps she will be able to find the middle ground with her latest project, a new
architecture school in Lyon opening this
September with a name that says it all:
“Confluence: Institute for Innovation
and Creative Strategies in Architecture.”
Rather than offering a traditional architectural cursus, the school aims to find
novel ways of approaching the discipline
through partnerships with artists, scientists, neurologists, and industry.
The perception, manipulation, and
understanding of space are particular
areas of interest for Decq. Reaction in
France has been mixed, with many in the
profession carping at what they see as
an upstart institution that, as a privately
funded initiative, escapes the usual French
state control and is therefore instantly
suspect to eyes adjusted to bureaucracy.
But for Decq, escaping control and bureaucracy to reach new horizons – recapturing the “anything’s possible” optimism of her youth – is precisely the
point … and a daily combat.
“I’m still at war. Against received
ideas. Against the principle of precaution. Against today’s general timidity. Against the fact that no one
is prepared to take risks anymore, or,
consequently, responsibility. Against
the fact that people think the world
is getting worse while I think it can
always get better. There are so many
things to fight against. Every morning I set out for the battlefield.”
From the archive
For these related stories,
visit 032c.com/archive
cLaUDe PareNt: the SUPermoDerNiSt
Niklas Maak, Issue #20, Winter 2010/2011
JaN KaPLicKY: FUtUre SYStemS
Maria Fusco, Issue #7, Summer 2004
Decq in her studio on rue des Arquebusiers, Paris,
where she employs a staff of 15
LacatoN & vaSSaL: Game chaNGer
Carson Chan, Issue #23, Winter 2012/2013
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