Jocelyne Behrend
Practice: Behrend Architecture
Established: 1985
City: Paris
Country: France
www.behrend-architecture.com
[email protected]
Jocelyne Behrend, architect (DPLG) and town-planner, realised her first building, a home for young workers and a day-care centre for the city of Saint-Mande, won an award from the Conseil en Architecture of the Ile-de-France. Founded in 1996, Behrend Architecture Agency has achieved more than thirty projects in fields as wide-ranging as culture, health and social amenities (accommodation for the homeless, retirement homes and hospitals). The practice seeks to create a radical, refined architecture in the service of man.
Jocelyne Behrend represents the Order of Architects of the Ile-de-France region on panels of judges for public projects. She was the advisory architect for INSERM (French National Medical Research Centre), consulting architect for the development of a masterplan for social housing in the Yvelines region and for the research into an urban-renewal scheme for the Dunlop city.
Behrend Architecture
Senlis Hospital
The restructuring of the Senlis Hospital was a real challenge: to build on a steep slope the extension of a building constructed in the 1970s while ensuring the perfect coherence of the new complex, stressing the human scale of the establishment (250 beds) and guaranteeing its elegance. Two levels were built: the upper comprised rooms and facilities; the lower housed the reception, thus allowing the creation of calming internal gardens.
| Do you think our profession is diverse enough? | For a long time, architecture has been as diverse as human society itself. Today, in the era of globalisation, globalised aesthetic canons and technology, architecture needs to fight against the temptation of standardisation and to work on the diversity of places, usage and the architectural act. This inspires our approach, which is always appropriate for the site and the people who are supposed to live in the space conceived by us and those who will be in touch with it. |
| What do you find most rewarding in your area of work? | What is most rewarding for us is society and societal involvement. Architecture leads to changes throughout society. This has implications and consequences. My engagement benefits and touches people in all kinds of ways. Through their surroundings, environment and living area, people are affected and enriched by architecture and clever, thoughtful urban planning. |
| How have your clients and projects benefited from your involvement? | Architecture is the philosophy of human relations in action. What prevails in my work as an architect is commitment and the place of man in architecture, especially in the field of health, where our approach attempts to re-establish a social, intergenerational link and make health centres not just perfectly functional establishments, but also places to live. We favour an architecture open to a world as a universe in which everybody may feel they are its living centre. |