Judith le Maire
Judith Le Maire, born in 1972, is an architect and holds a PhD in Art History, specializing in the history of contemporary architecture, from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her doctoral thesis, entitled The Participatory Grammar: Architectural and Urban Theories and Practices between 1904 and 1968, was awarded a prize by the French Academy of Architecture.
It was published in 2014 under the title Places, Goods, Common Bonds: The Emergence of a Participatory Grammar in Architecture and Urban Planning, 1904–1969, by the Editions of the Université de Bruxelles. Judith Le Maire has taught design in the AOC Architecture studio (Architecture, Design Tools) at the Faculty of Architecture of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She is currently co-holder of the Contemporary Architectural Theory course in the first year of the Master’s program (MA1).
She served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, also in charge of research (2016–2018). From 2018 to 2020, she was Vice-Rector for International Relations and Development Cooperation at ULB. In this capacity, she co-founded, with Rector Yvon Englert, the CIVIS – A Civic University Alliance, funded by the European Union.
She coordinated the Architectural Research Centre of La Cambre (CRAC) and has been actively developing research and doctoral programs within the Faculty of Architecture at ULB, where she also directed the CLARA research center. She was a member of the board of the interuniversity thematic doctoral school of the Académie Wallonie-Bruxelles (ULB, ULg, UCL, UMons) under the FNRS. For the past five years, she has co-organized an intensive doctoral school week for architects at ISAU in Kinshasa—funded by ARES—and has been involved in doctoral training with other partners (African Heritage School in Porto-Novo, Benin; ENSA Paris-La Villette; ENSAP Bordeaux; etc.). Within the Faculty of Architecture at ULB, she has been working to formalize doctoral training specific to research in architecture and urban planning, particularly methodologies related to spatialization. She is responsible for the research methodology seminar in the third year of the Bachelor’s program (B3) and supervises several doctoral theses in this field.
She has contributed her expertise, notably to the Sustainable Neighborhoods Facilitation Service of Brussels Environment for several years, and collaborated for ten years in designing and delivering continuing education programs for public officials and designers on the profession and culture of public space through the PYBLIK program for the Brussels-Capital Region (2007–2017).
The training and activist engagement of architects—particularly in public commissions and civil society—is one of her key concerns. Since her doctoral thesis, she has developed research on the history of participation, its tools, the role of architects within it, and the aesthetic and material consequences of participatory processes on urban planning and architecture. Questions of identity and architectural culture, and the ways these are conveyed, have also been central to her work on the reception of architecture. Currently, her research focuses on the skyline as a marker of Brussels’ metropolitan visual identity, as well as on situated local constructive identities.
During a research leave (FNRS–ULB, 2021–2022), she examined research methodologies in doctoral studies in architecture from a decentering perspective: “Epistemological Foundations of Situated Research – Data, Concepts, Frameworks and Historiography in Building Arts and Urban Planning. DRC – Benin.”
Contact : judlemai@ulb.be