The architect Jacques Ripault has just left us, at the age of 62.
Jacques Ripault graduated from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture in 1981. In the same year, he was awarded the Albums de la Jeune Architecture before becoming a resident of the Académie de France in Rome from 1983 to 1985.
With architect Denise Duhart, he founded «l'Atelier d'Architecture» in 1985. Together, they built numerous housing buildings in Paris and its suburbs, university venues, and cultural facilities. The realization in 1990 of the University Center Port Royal-René Cassin in Paris made them known on the national scene.
Jacques Ripault paid careful attention to the drawing. In love with light, he who wanted to «make aerial what is heavy» was able to reinterpret the references of modern architecture and restore them in a dense urban context.
Teaching in France and abroad, Jacques Ripault called for a demanding teaching of architecture and the “transmission of ideals to resist reality”. He was also a Crown Architect.
Jacques Ripault claimed to be of a generation "crystallized on urban issues", those of the suburbs and peri-urban neighborhoods, attentive to uses and contexts to act with the same application in all situations. It is in this spirit that he realized in 2005 the museum of contemporary art «MAC VAL» of Vitry-sur-Seine for the general council of Val-de-Marne, laying the foundations of a new form of urbanity where transparencies, the richness of the museum routes, the enhancement of the existing park offers to the inhabitants generous spaces at the same time as a strong cultural symbol for the south of the Parisian metropolis.
It is in the name of a free architecture, in the service of the public, that he thought of this work housing other works, and it is especially this beautiful quest for freedom that we will regret.
I extend my condolences to his family and loved ones.