JOURDA Architectes (F) Françoise-Hélène Jourda (1955)
Françoise-Hélène Jourda has been a leading light of French architecture since the 1980s, dividing her career as architect-cum-teacher between France, Germany (where she has completed many projects) and Austria (where she has been teaching at the T.U. in Vienna since 1999). She was associated with the architect Gilles Perraudin from 1980 until 1988, when she founded Jourda Architectes in Paris and Lyons. As a major representative of the high-tech movement in France, she is nowadays directing her concern for technological innovation and precision at a form of architecture that relates in a smart way with its environment. Within Emscher Park, a huge project of the second I.B.A. for the conversion and regeneration of the industrial basin of the Ruhr, her project for the Akademie Mont-Cenis Herne (1991-1999, completed) wound up a lone of thinking about micro-climatic envelopes. The building resembles a controlled micro-environment, whose actual skin--a smart glass envelope, fitted with photovoltaic cells--generates its own energy, and whose construction is planned so as to be both ecologically and economically viable.