Lecture 12: Elodie Degavre - La vie en kit (Life, assembled)

A steel city that makes the neighbours gossip. Lightweight Japanese-style houses, designed by their future buyers. A construction kit entrusted to students. In Brussels, Liège and Charleroi (Belgium), three architects and a handful of adventurous inhabitants are willing to make their utopia a reality: housing in kit form, affordable to all. 50 years after the realisation of their prototypes, the three now elderly architects – Kroll, Englebert and Petit – take the director on a journey of discovery through these extraordinary homes. In the course of this joyful travel through time, a crucial question emerges: what about us, how will we live tomorrow? With this documentary, Elodie Degavre revives the spirit of an era and echoes our contemporary questions about the housing crisis. But her personal approach also leads us towards deeper questions: what is the role of the architect, and how can we inherit yesterday’s utopias? Elodie will be on hand to introduce the screening and discuss the film with the audience.

Elodie Degavre is an architect, teacher, and film director based in Brussels. She worked in several architectural offices as a project manager and collaborates with A+ Architecture in Belgium. Working now as a researcher (UCLouvain) in the field of sensitive research methods, she released a documentary film about affordable housing experiments in the 1970’s: La vie en kit (Life, assembled).

ACC Lecture Serie 2024 - Limits of architecture. Architecture of limits is curated by DASP Students / Phd in Architecture. History and Project: Federica Joe Gardella, Giulia Montanaro, Paolo Bianco, Hongye Wu, Federico Madaro, Federica Serra, Saurajeeta Bose, Caterina Juric, Marta Rossi. And coordinated by Professor Mauro Berta.

For those who are interested in presence, the conferences will be held in Classroom 201 Lingotto, on Thursday May 16^th / 13.00-14.30.

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