Caroline Mierop & Jean-Pierre HoaSimone Guillissen-Hoa, Architecte, 1916-1996

The Peinture Fraîche bookshop and the Faculté d’Architecture la Cambre Horta are joining forces to mark the publication of the book Simone Guillissen-Hoa, Architecte. 1916-1996 (ed. Prisme) and invite you to meet the two authors Caroline Mierop and Jean-Pierre Hoa on Wednesday 29 November 2023, from 6pm to 9pm, at the Victor Bourgeois auditorium (19 place Eugène Flagey, 1050).

The book
Born in Peking in 1916 to a Chinese father, an engineer, and a Polish mother, a writer, Simone Guillissen-Hoa went to school in Paris at the age of 12, studied in England and then in Belgium, graduating in Brussels in 1938, and played a part in the architectural adventure of the 20th century.

Caroline Mierop recounts the extraordinary life of this Eurasian woman, activist, resistance fighter, deportee, single mother and self-employed entrepreneur. She talks about her friends and her loves, her doubts and her advanaces, her clients and her achievements. This is the first monograph on this “grande dame of architecture” to which, until now, no publication has been devoted.

A well-informed and flexible writer, the author offers both an intense narrative and an in-depth study, bringing together many previously unpublished personal accounts and archive documents, as well as seven “souvenir portraits” by Jean-Pierre Hoa.

The authors

Caroline Mierop
Trained as an architect and urban planner, Caroline Mierop has headed a number of institutions and major cultural and artistic projects, mainly in Belgium and France. Among other things, she was director of the Fondation pour l’Architecture in Brussels when it was set up in 1987.
She taught architecture for some twenty years, and from 2003 to 2017 directed the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre. She is the author of several books on architecture and numerous articles. She is currently active in various bodies, associations and foundations in the fields of art, architecture and youth.

With the participation of Jean-Pierre Hoa
An architect who worked in Brussels and Belgium from 1975 to 2005, Jean-Pierre Hoa was also a music critic for several Belgian and foreign newspapers. He has published numerous articles on opera. A photographer from an early age, a keen traveller, an art lover and a collector, in recent years he has also devoted himself to making an inventory of the personal and professional archives left by his mother Simone Guillissen-Hoa in the flat where she lived until her death in 1996 and which he now occupies, having restored it to its original state. At the invitation of Caroline Mierop, he signed the seven ‘souvenir portraits’ that punctuate the biographical narrative.