Born in 1929 in Oran, she entered the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, after studying Philosophy. A communist activist, she graduated in 1961 with an interest in the subject of collective housing. For more than four decades, this subject occupied a central place in her creations, one of the leading examples being the renovation of the city center of Ivry-sur-Seine, a project for which she was the architect in charge in 1969. She then proposed to Jean Renaudie to join her.
The spaces that Renée Gailhoustet designed integrated housing with individualized and staggered terraces, shops, equipment, public spaces and promenades, and sought to promote exchanges and the well-being of its inhabitants.
Her most important projects include the Lenin Tower, the Raspail Tower, the Casanova Tower and the Jeanne Hachette Tower, as well as the Liégat, Spinoza and Marat complexes in Ivry-sur-Seine, La Maladrerie in Aubervilliers, L’Îlot 8 de la Zone Basilique in Saint-Denis, and the signature of thirty-five social housing units in Villejuif. In 2022, she received the Royal Academy Architecture Award for her pioneering work in collective housing.


To pay homage to her, Crédac is showing Promenée (1988) by the artist Christian Merlhiot, a film retracing the path of an imaginary walker through Renée Gailhoustet’s buildings, where interior and exterior spaces communicate with fluidity.