17. Émeraude

The DAUPHINS ARCHITECTURE agency was set up in 2008 by Hugues Joinau and Faïçal Oudor, both of whom graduated from the Bordeaux ENSAP in 2007. Hugues and Faïçal are associated DPLG architects, and have been co-managers of their agency since its creation. Made up of seven associated architects, all graduates of the Bordeaux School of Architecture, the DAUPHINS ARCHITECTURE agency has as many individual creative worlds to call upon. “Sharing within the group guarantees its cohesiveness and is the basis for our vision of architecture – a source of momentum for all of us. It nourishes a project, forms highly original work teams and allows for a variety of initiatives to come into play, so ensuring an ever-renewed viewpoint. Finding constant inspiration in the life around us, in colour and in materials, we aspire to transmit the pleasure we take in creating and our sense of beauty”. They are respectively President and Co-Manager of the “Dauphins Résidence” association, a body encouraging research and production in art and architecture.

Hugues Joinau is a part-time teacher at the Bordeaux ENSAP, for first and second-year undergraduate studies, 2011/2012 and 2010. Since 2009, he has been involved in facilitating architecture workshops for teenagers in difficulty on behalf of the Bordeaux CATTP (part-time therapeutic reception centre), and also leads occasional “cabin” workshops designed for autistic children. In October 2010, he trained in “Raw-Earth Construction” with Carasol, and was introduced to geobiology by Alain Crégut & Giorgio Thurn, while at the same time taking a course in energetics, “L’Eveil au Vivant” (awakening to the living world), dispensed by Marie-Laure Jousset & François Maurios. He has created many installations in natural surroundings, either resulting from calls for projects or on his own initiative. He was a member of the Design jury at “Agora”, the architecture biennial in Bordeaux, in 2008, and was project leader at the Brochet-Lajus-Pueyo agency in 2007, for scenography of the “Paris en Île-de-France” exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris.

Faïçal Oudor is co-manager of documentation at the agency. He worked as an assistant in the Brochet-Lajus-Pueyo agencies in 2006, where he participated in the competition for a school of music and dance in Saint-Maximin-de-la-Sainte-Baume, at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (project underway) and development of the Cœur d’Orly ZAC (integrated development zone – project underway); he worked as an assistant at the Paranteau & Ithurbide architectural agency from 2004 to 2006.

Quentin Geffroy is a DPLG landscaper who graduated from the Bordeaux ENSAP in 2008. Alongside his work for other architectural and landscaping agencies, he developed his own practice, to which he committed himself fully in 2010. From gardening to urban appropriation, the relationship to the land directly experienced in the garden might well be seen as the common denominator of a practice with a multitude of overlapping levels. The garden is an everlasting experiment, a posture of humility that, confronted with the tangible and ever-shifting reality of the landscape, enables him to literally take in hand the modification of a space where the gardener’s vulnerability in the face of natural phenomena is often a cause for wonder. By imagining the town and the area it covers as a garden, he approaches projects bearing on development of public areas, and more specifically on urban nature, as a process for re-creation of an urban vernacular in which the underlying need is neither alimentary nor aesthetic, but social.