Gaelle Rioualen
Junior Architect for the North American Area
"Big corporations are lucky because they have substantial manpower, technical and financial resources to undertake large scale projects."
Gaelle Rioualen holds a master's degree in Architecture and she currently works for the LVMH Group's Louis Vuitton luxury brand. The team in the Architectural Division includes full-time architects who has assigned to work on projects spread out in various regions across the world. Gaelle, who is a junior architect, works on projects on the west coast of the United States. "I organize my work based on time difference. In the morning, I go through and read the e-mails that come in during the night so that I can be free in the afternoon for calls and conference calls," she explains. Vuitton Paris handles project design and Vuitton New York manages budgets and schedules, requests for proposals and supervising ongoing work. "Several times a year, we typically travel to various cities in the U.S. and at least once a year to New York for an annual meeting," says Gaelle who learned English on the job and who is delighted to be working with people in France and abroad. "The work environment at Vuitton is very international. It's really like a Tower of Babel," she says. While it helps to have an appreciation of luxury and fashion to work for the company, that is not enough. "My friends and family thought at the outset that I was just going to work on the interior design of the stores. But that has not turned out to be the case. There is a lot of work to be done on the building structures, façades and the lighting..." she analyzes. How has Gaelle managed to develop this double qualification?
Although her academic background is actually in science and mathematics, Gaelle has an appreciation for the aesthetically pleasing. So Architecture seemed like a professional that she might like. Therefore, during the first three years of her architectural studies, she tried out a broad spectrum of artistic activities. "Studying architecture is great because it's a multidisciplinary area of study. I studied drawing, photography, video, model making," she says enthusiastically. But the next two years during the master's degree, Gaelle was preparing to enter the job market and spent that time honing more technical skills. As part of her preparation, she did her master's thesis on a subject that combined fashion and architecture: a detailed analysis of façade coatings comparing them to clothing. By chance, at that time there was a posting for a student internship in Louis Vuitton's Architectural Division on a notice board at school. The project manager who interviewed her seemed fairly interested in her research and hired her for a 4-month internship. "That first work experience was directly related to the subject of my thesis," she explains. Highly motivated, she then got down to preparing her graduation project. Her school, the National Advanced Architecture School in Nantes, offered a number of different programs for students to choose from. Her academic supervisor was an architect and acoustician. Under his supervision, she learned about soundproofing and using space, sound and lighting. In June 2008 after graduating, Gaelle began another 3-month internship, this time for the famous french architect, Jean Nouvel. She worked on a small team in charge of designing a showroom. There, as a fresh graduate she gained experience working on all phases of project design. "The reputation of this firm is not exaggerated; you really do gain twice as much experience working for them," she explains.
After that, her career gathered pace. The Vuitton luxury fashion house contacted her and offered her a position as assistant project manager in the Architectural Division. Her internship had given her the opportunity to learn about how things work in the company. Now, she is working on U.S.-based projects. "If you include design, a project takes on average a little more than a year to be delivered and that is about the time it took me to become independent in my work," she expounds. Her managers were very happy with her work and gave her a promotion. Gaelle was promoted to junior architect of the Americas region. "Now, I've earned a certain amount of responsibility, I can work more on my own. I have to admit that there was some luck involved," she humbly admits. She also discovered aspects of her job that she has never thought about. For example, lighting design plays an important role in lighting a store and the products displayed there. "What I never knew, though, was that in the United States there are laws with very specific restrictions on the amount of energy expenditure authorized for a given project. The lighting designer is also responsible for these calculations," she reports. Gaelle also likes working for a luxury group that has the resources to promote and undertake ambitious projects. "We often include works of modern art made by contemporary artists in our stores. That's not something that everybody can afford to do!" she proclaimes.
What inspires her? "I love high-rise towers, places from which you can look out on the landscape. I keep a little travel journal where I write about such places. I especially like the Petronas Twin Towers because they are the first ones that I ever visited."
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