Paul Bouet

Paul Bouet is a lecturer in architectural history and cultures at ENSA Paris-Est and a researcher at OCS/AUSser. His research and teaching aim to reinterpret the history of 20th-century architecture through the lens of environmental issues. He is interested in how concerns related to climate, energy, materials, and living organisms have shaped the history of architecture and shed light on the current situation. He explores three main areas of research. One aims to understand how colonization served as a laboratory for the development of knowledge, techniques, and building types designed to adapt to climates radically different from those of metropolitan areas, particularly between Africa and France, while also embodying power relations. It also looks at the emergence of alternative approaches to architecture that sought to reduce the environmental impact of building construction but were often marginalized and forgotten, and whose rediscovery can inform our present. Finally, he analyzes the environmental strategies explored in contemporary architecture, particularly in terms of building transformation, using resources from the past to inform and theorize current practices.

In his forthcoming book, Domesticating Solar Energy: Decolonization and Environmentalism in Postwar France (Zurich, gta Verlag), he traces the history of solar energy research in postwar France. He shows how solar energy research originated in the experiments of architects and scientists in North and West Africa at the end of the colonial period. He also analyzes how solar architecture was explored as a response to the rise of environmentalism and the oil crisis in the 1970s, before this alternative was marginalized. In his new research project, entitled “Urbanizing the Sahara,” he focuses on the air-conditioned buildings and cities built by the French in the desert to extract oil and natural gas during the Algerian War of Independence. In particular, he highlights the dual nature of architecture and urban planning in their relationship to climate, between adaptation and degradation. He is also preparing an anthology and biography of Jeanne-Marie Alexandroff, a forgotten theorist of the relationship between architecture and the environment.

Before being appointed lecturer in 2023, he was a doctoral fellow in residence at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in the summer of 2019, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta Institute) at ETH Zurich in 2022-2023 thanks to the Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellowship. He was also awarded the Scot Opler Fellowship for Emerging Scholar from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2024. In addition to his commitments at ENSA Paris-Est, he is also a lecturer at the School of Engineering and Architecture in Fribourg, Switzerland. He has published research and critical articles in the journals Architecture Beyond Europe, e-flux, L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, Oase, and Werk, bauen + wohnen. His work has been exhibited at the second Versailles Architecture and Landscape Biennale and the tenth International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (in collaboration with Nicolas Dorval-Bory).

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