Portrait

Elizabeth de Portzamparc is an architect and sociologist. At a very young age, she founded and directed the Atelier d’Urbanisme Participatif d’Antony (Antony’s Participatory Urban Planning Workshop) and focused particularly on the different uses of buildings and the city, but also on the identity and genius of places. Her conviction is that the quality of a city depends on the diversity of its urban spaces, which allows it to be inhabited, in the many senses of the word. Its different places and their ambience must encourage a variety of uses, whether individual or collective, private or public. She has therefore created the notion of a hierarchy of intimacy, a principle that she applies at all levels of the city, from the street to the metropolis.
All of her work and theories illustrate what she now describes as “architecture of links”. This vision on which her work is based expresses a fundamental idea: the architect must take into account the totality of the links that a project establishes with its context, both physical and cultural. For Elizabeth de Portzamparc, it is only by taking all these elements into account simultaneously that the city can become truly sustainable. This is also what makes her work unique. Particularly aware of environmental issues, in 2008 she created within her agency the Sustainable Urban Planning Workshop, with a multidisciplinary team including sociologists and anthropologists who participate in the development of her experimental projects.
She is responsible for one of the five emblematic stations of the Greater Paris, the Le Bourget station, as well as the Great Library of the Condorcet Campus and the TIOC Tower in Taiwan. A symbol of the city of Taichung,the TIOC will be the first fourth-generation tower designed as a village, a veritable vertical neighborhood. Also worth mentioning is the Pudong Palace of Science, which will open in 2021, a flagship facility of the future Chinese “Silicon Valley” of Shanghai.

The Musée de la Romanité she designed for the city of Nîmes, inaugurated in 2018, has been chosen by AD magazine as one of the most important museums built in the world since 1950.