Food for thought

Sustainable development requires us to rethink architecture on the basis of the material resources we have locally and can renew, to control the conditions of their production and limit their transport, and to restrict their transformation, which is always energy-intensive. These conditions prompted Joud Beaudoin to reinvest the Plaines du Loup community center with a combination of traditional building materials and techniques, using raw earth, lime and hemp.

Study partners from the start of their architectural training at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Lyon (Ensal), then at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Epfl) for their Master's degree and joint diploma in 2009, they now jointly run the Lausanne office of Joud Beaudoin Architectes. The office was born in 2012, on the initiative of Christophe Joud, who first enlisted the help and experience of Clément Vergély, associate architect in Lyon, before being joined by Lorraine Beaudoin in 2014. In parallel with the first years in the office, they share their practice with academic experience. From 2010 to 2020, they contributed to various research and theoretical writings on collective housing by joining the Laboratoire de théorie et d'histoire de l'architecture (Lth2, Epfl), under the direction of Bruno Marchand, also taking part in the in teaching housing design at the Geneva School of Landscape, Engineering and Architecture (Hepia). Today, they maintain their interest in theoretical exchange and project criticism through regular invitations to workshop presentations at the Hes and Epfl, or as members of professional juries. Their projects and creations are mainly the result of public competitions.