Atelier Architecture Perraudin — Grand Prix national de l’architecture 2024

Atelier Architecture Perraudin — National Grand Prize for Architecture 2024 - “Architecture? It’s meant to make people happy!”

Winner of the National Grand Prize for Architecture 2024, Atelier Architecture Perraudin takes up residence in the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine with an exhibition that illustrates its humanist and sustainable vision of architecture, where every gesture builds a link between people, matter and territory.

Following Pierre-Louis Faloci in 2022 and Atelier Philippe Prost in 2024, it is now Atelier Architecture Perraudin’s turn to be granted a carte blanche at the Cité.

Renowned for its expertise in eco-responsible construction, the firm asserts that architecture is not merely a gesture, but a way of inhabiting the world. In a world dominated by speed and abstraction, it is about rediscovering the presence of the tangible, the slowness of making, and the precision of the gesture.

Founded in 2017 by Gilles Perraudin and Jean-Manuel Perraudin, the studio is part of a commitment pursued for more than half a century: building sustainably with local resources, in service of the common good. An heir to a tradition of builders, it defends patient and humanist architecture, where beauty arises from constructive rigor, the clarity of volumes, and the serenity of places.

Attentive to soils, climates, and uses, the studio seeks to reweave the broken thread of a situated architecture. Stone, earth, and wood are not for it materials to dominate, but to understand. This attention to matter yields a freedom: that of a measured, durable and true making, giving rise to an architecture that is sober, hospitable, and alive.

Eight projects deployed in France, Romania and Senegal illustrated by photographs, sketches and graphic documents will be presented at the Cité to illuminate the studio’s philosophy: to build to make people happy.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of a book and the inaugural lecture of the École de Chaillot, enabling a deep dive into the heart of this approach where rigor and humanity meet.

The National Grand Prize for Architecture honors an architect, or a team of architects, for their entire body of work. This prize, awarded every two years by the Ministry of Culture, is an opportunity to recognize and publicize an exemplary approach to architecture.