Jury

Olivier Leclercq
Architect, urbanist
Vice President of the House of Architecture Ile de France.
I studied architecture at UCL in Tournai (Belgium), at TU Karlsruhe in Germany, and urban planning at ENSA Lille. In parallel, I learned photography at the House of Culture Tournai. In 1997, I worked in London and Warsaw for the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
I worked for two years in Abidjan as an architect, partly for humanitarian projects.
I live and work in the Paris region, associated with Cyrille Hanappe to form AIR architecture office in 2001. We realize mixed urban projects, innovative housing, public buildings and integrate co-design with inhabitants in all our projects.
Since 2016, I am also Secretary General of Actes & Cités, an association for slum clearance and refugee reception.
In parallel, I continue a research at Ecole d’Architecture de La Villette about the valorization of the land by the users expertise in operations of urban prefigurations.

Contemporary design analogy in the midst of arid environments. Perceiving architecture as means of inspiration and excitement through multi-disciplinary projects

parametric architecture

René’s work in recent years explores the contemporary and future forms of the urban border between the United States and Mexico. René is a coauthor, with Fiamma Montezemolo and Heriberto Yépez, of the book, Here is Tijuana, published in 2006 by Black Dog, London. In 2018, he co-edited, along with Tito Alegría and Roger Lewis, the commemorative edition of the book A Temporary Paradise: A look at the special landscape of the San Diego Region, originally prepared by Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard (COLEF 2018).

His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Santa Monica Art Museum, Mexico House at the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, DC, Shenzhen Architecture and Urbanism Biennial 2007 and the Central Society of Architects in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2015, his research on the Experimental Housing Project (PREVI) in Lima, Peru, was part of the exhibition “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2017, he directed Hyperloop West, a group that went on to become a semi-finalist in the global challenge competition organized by Virgin Hyperloop One. In 2017, Rene curated the Tijuana-San Diego exhibit space at the 2017 Architecture and Urbanism Biennial in Seoul, Korea.