For more than 20 years, Christophe Hutin has been critically reflecting on city construction and its rationale for exclusion. His wish is to help residents regain control of their built environment to better find their place in the city.
“Today, the inhabitant is the last link in the production chain. But the inhabitant’s expertise can be – not a result or an argument – but a resource in the composition of the architecture.”
Christophe Hutin is an architect and lecturer-researcher at the Bordeaux National School of Architecture. Graduating in 2003, he studied for several months and documented the townships and squatter camps in Soweto near Johannesburg. This experience gave rise to the publication of the book “Learning from Soweto, Construct freely” at Éditions Acte Sud, co-written with Patrice Goulet. From there he developed recognized expertise on housing issues in South Africa which led him in particular to design and organize since 2008 the annual EUNIC international architecture studio events supported by the European cultural institutes of South Africa in Johannesburg. These are workshops and exchanges between architects, residents, teachers and students on issues of contemporary urban development in critical sites (informal housing, squat, etc.) Specializing in sustainable architecture based on the construction economy, he has carried out numerous projects in the field of housing but also public cultural facilities. Several achievements bear witness to this research carried out in particular in collaboration with the architects Lacaton and Vassal (urban study of 50,000 dwellings, project to transform buildings G, H, I in the large park in Bordeaux). With them, he won the European Union prize, the Mies Van Der Rohe prize in 2019. Christophe Hutin has been appointed curator of the French pavilion at the Venice 2020 biennale of architecture around his project: “communities at work”.