User:Olivyy/Draft:Olivia Chaumont (1)

Olivia Chaumont, born in Meudon, France on October 30, 1950 is a French architect and urbanist. A trans woman, she became in 2010 the first official female member of The Grand Orient de France. An activist of the trans cause, she is the author of From one body to another, an autobiographical account on trans identity.

Biography
Olivia Chaumont first pursued an education in science in preparatory courses in upper school then switched to architecture. She entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, pedagogical unit 6, and earned her diploma in 1978. She completed her training as an architect by study urban planning at the Institut d'urbinisme in Paris.

Architecture and Urbanism
In 1981, she founded the firm Urbatecture and then, in 1991, the architecture and urban planning firm Atelier Cité (City Studio) which she directed until 2008. She was named in 1990 an expert by the State and the Regional Council of Nord-Pas-de-Calais for the remediation of industrial brownfield sites. Throughout these years, she led numerous architecture and urban planning projects. In 1990, she won the national award "For an architecture of rehabilitation" launched by the Ministry of Materials (now the Ministry of Ecology) for her rehabilitation of a large housing development project Montereau-Ruffins in Montreuil. The approach is innovative. It is based on the clarification between private and public spaces and the affirmation of a new residential type. This project would be cited as an example in France and abroad for its method of reintegrating a large housing collective in an urban structure that surrounds it. In the same town, Olivia Chaumont is an urban planner for the ZAC downtown, which led her to meet architect Alavaro Siza. There she realized a collection of 110 social housing units that dominate the town square.

Interested at the end of the 1980s by the question of urban brownfield sites, as well as the mutability of land, she developed theoretical tools for defining global urban strategies on a given territory. In her first study and until the very last, she refined this approach of urban management where the urban form is the determining element of the urban politic. She build on and extended the principles of an open island defined by Christian de Portzamparc in what he calls the age of the isle of the city.