Etienne Randier Fraile

After a brief spell studying geography, Etienne Randier Fraile graduated from Ensa Grenoble in 2015 before obtaining the HMONP in 2017.

During these years, he spent a year as an exchange student at the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design in Montevideo, a year that was definitively seminal in his career. That year, he initiated a research project linking modest and informal human settlements, riversides and climatic hazards.

Since then, the relationship between socio-spatial inequalities and the consequences of climate change has been a permanent feature of both his theoretical and practical work. His experience working for architecture, landscape and urban planning agencies such as Axe-Saône architecture+paysage and Frys associés, as well as collaborating as a freelance architect, has enabled him to extend the interests, if not the necessities, of intervening at different project scales, such as his participation in the production of a guide plan for Saint-Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana. The desire to understand the cultures of living, rooted in their territories, requires us to (re)think together the built and the living, water and earth.

As such, he recently defended his doctorate in architecture entitled "Les marges: territoires d'exploration du projet. Housing in a situation of uncertainty in Montevideo*. Carried out within the AE&CC Research Unit at Ensa Grenoble and supervised by Aysegül Cankat, this work enabled him to examine the geomorphological, historical and urban dimensions that have led to the processes of transformation and manufacture of these riverside and coastal margins, which today face combined and significant climatic hazards. Tracing the long processes involved in the formation of the physical environment, the metropolitan transformations and the shorter processes involved in the creation of the habitat were the essential stages.

These transformations, past, present and future, have been examined in particular through the tools of representation that have had to be updated in order to contribute to the development of project tools capable of proposing transformations that are more targeted, shared and adapted to these inhabited sites.