Paul Bouet

Paul Bouet is a lecturer in architectural history and culture at ENSA Paris-Est and a researcher at OCS/AUSser. His research and teaching aim to re-read the history of twentieth-century architecture through the prism of environmental issues. He is interested in the way in which concerns about climate, energy, materials and the living world have permeated architecture's past and shed light on the current situation. In particular, it explores three lines of research. The first aims to understand how colonisation provided a laboratory for the development of knowledge, techniques and types of building designed to adapt to climates that were radically different from those of the metropolises, particularly between Africa and France, while at the same time materialising relationships of power. It also looks at the emergence of alternative trajectories in architecture that have sought to reduce the impact of building construction on the environment, but which have often been marginalised and forgotten, and whose rediscovery may inform our present. Lastly, he sets out to analyse the environmental strategies explored in contemporary architecture, particularly with regard to the transformation of buildings, using the resources of the past to illuminate and theorise current practices.

In his forthcoming book, Domesticating Solar Energy: Decolonization and Environmentalism in Postwar France (Zurich, gta Verlag), he traces the history of research into solar energy in post-war France. It shows how research into solar energy had its origins in the experiments of architects and scientists in North and West Africa at the end of the colonial period. He also analyses how solar architecture was explored as a response to the rise of environmentalism and the oil crisis in the 1970s, before this alternative was marginalised. In his new research project, entitled 'Urbanising the Sahara', he looks at the air-conditioned buildings and towns 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 with the climate, between adaptation and degradation. He is also preparing an anthology and biography of Jeanne-Marie Alexandroff, a forgotten theorist on the relationship between architecture and the environment.

Before being appointed a lecturer in 2023, he was a doctoral student 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 by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2024. In addition to his work at ENSA Paris-Est, he is also a lecturer at the Fribourg School of Engineering and Architecture in 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 Biennale d'architecture et de paysage de Versailles and the tenth International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (in collaboration with Nicolas Dorval-Bory).