Sophie Gironnay
Fille unique de Jean Dalmain (Jean Gironnay DIT Dalmain) et de Monique Tremblay dite Leyrac, née à Dieulefit, Drôme, le 6 août 1953, De 1979 à 2004, elle fait carrière de journaliste. À l’Actualité, elle fera des reportages intéressants sur les femmes voilées, sur la Crise d’Oka, ou se retrouvant à faire une interview avec Margaret Atwood…Elle entame alors en même temps 7 ans d’études universitaires pour passer une maîtrise en Étude des arts. Elle gagne un prix national pour la meilleure thèse en sciences humaines. Elle rêve de devenir responsable des publications d’un musée. Mais le journalisme la rattrape puisqu’en 1992 elle devient surnuméraire au Devoir. Elle crée la page Formes en 1994.
L’idée d’une galerie d’architecture (chose inexistante alors) est lancée autour d’une bière lors d’un vernissage, entre un copain architecte et elle. Nouveau tournant!
Mai 2001, la Maison d’Architecture du Québec est officiellement fondée, elle en est toujours la directrice générale et artistique.
En 2007, elle fut finaliste aux Prix du Gouverneur général avec un roman jeunesse : Philou architecte et associés.
Portée par une espèce de délire de perfectionnement au milieu d’un sentiment de peur et d’insécurité, la création la porte, comme ce fut le cas pour ses parents Jean Dalmain et Monique Leyrac, une sorte de passion de travailler pour défendre la Beauté du monde…
https://maisondelarchitecture.ca/
Michel Mella
Mon amie d’enfance et ses parents, si chers à mon cœur.
Merci de les mettre en valeur.
Jacques Poirier,
Madame Gironnay,
Merci pour ce merveilleux reportage que vous avez pondu sur mon aventure Arontec de l’an 2000. Vous serez bientôt fière de m’avoir pour un moment fait confiance. Le prototype de cette maison Arontec fut assassiné et enterré en secret dans la cours de l’usine. L’usine fut fondée en 1927 par Alphonse Piché, génial bonhomme qui eut deux pils, Guy et Denis. Après sa mort, ces deux garnements se sont affrontés pendant une décennjie pour le contrôle de la prospère usine produisant annuellement des douzaines de maisons faites de poutres ainsi machinées pour former dans les coins des joints en queues d’aronde, d’ou le nom d’Arontec. Je regrette d’avoir à vous écrire la suite de cette histoire en anglais, , faute de temps malheureusement, mais il me fera plaisir de la traduire si votre maîtrise de l’anglais n’est pas au rendez-vous. J’habite en Californie ou ma société s’apprête à ré-introduire sous une forme plus techniquement actuelle le concept que vous avez si bien compris lors de votre reportage. Je suis un vieux monsieur qui à 80 ans garde un bon souvenir, découvrant il y a seulement quelques jours la suite admirable de votre vie, ajoujtant à mon plaisisr votre mère Monique Leyrac que j’idolâtre toujours. Pardonnez mon français boiteux, m’exprimant en anglais uniquement depuis 20 ans. Voici cette lettre récente adressée aux actionnaires de ma société, vous souhaitant des années de bonheur:
The hyperactive and thrifty squirrel in me has been over the years stockpiling about 30 promising projects based on inventions of mine that I saw as so obvious as to not bother with patents, feeling in my gut that these ideas would soon be picked up by others if I don’t have time to dig them up in my retirement to finish, produce, sell or just license them for others to own. Out of these 30 ideas, 20 have never been picked up by others, to my knowledge all available for licensing by others, using provisional patents, in three weeks as earlier announced.
Now, a lot of my stuff appeals to engineers and mechanically inclined people or companies. They involve a lot of machines and steel and plain old engineering points of sale.
There is one notable exception, the ARO project so dear to me, one that can be described with this sentence:
an industrial process that would allow two women to erect in 3 days a charming house shell using only one tool, a 13/16th » box wrench, assembling a log home with dovetail corners designed to meet all UBC building codes and capable of resisting to Force 5 hurricanes and force 3 or 4 tornadoes.
There are today in this country about 15 companies that sell log homes as chalets or cabins since they cannot sell them as regular housing. The latter usually go through a bank approved mortgage, this for the simple reason that wood is a poor insulator not capable of meeting the minimal R24 rating for walls and roofs if built in hot or cold climates. It would take logs the size of extra- large tree trunks to meet that rating. Once in awhile they get a cash-rich client not needing a mortgage and quite willing to install costly radiant heated floors or massive HVAC installations, this for showing off costly 12-inch logs.
In the late 90s I had to spend some time in Canada to watch over my mother who died a little later. I got involved with a Québec company selling for 50 years less and less of their dovetail log houses. I had fun getting involved with them and help them sell 20 of these for a vacation retreat, cabins near Mount Fuji in Japan. All wood homes have much appeal with asiatics. By sheer luck, I discovered and verified a stunning fact about wood. You will all hear about it at presentation time. This insight gave me the energy to design a building system, later to build a complex machine capable of producing one house a day on two shifts. Measuring 20 ft long and weighing over 2 tons, this machine was to be mine, eventually owning patents and rights to sell it in the US and Canada. Since they had paid for the materials, there was much haggling over this, but I was so excited that I kept on building the components for a prototype, going through an extensive set of tests to verify my premises and hopes. When they saw the results, everyone got excited. This company was formed in 1927 by a brilliant man who fathered two sons, each forever fighting for control of the company. Worse, now that they could see a real future for their company, the grandsons of that man we’re fighting for the FUTURE control of the company, so much so that they spent their days in court while I was working with one assistant in the shop, putting together a fantastic project supported by software that I was also coding at the time.
Story of my life, no one wants to pay me. They seem to judge that I’m having so much fun working that I should be paying them. They even said so!
I was ready to build, a beautiful stack of components piled up ready to put together for one hell of a cute house, Superior structurally, yet clean and pure and very affordable.
Mostly unaware of the family rumblings, I started to befriend Luc, the smarter son of Guy Piché, one of the two brothers, but unfortunately not of the one who was the acting president at that moment; this one went crazy over one weekend, with nobody watching he had employees dig a huge trench in the yard and bury all the components after setting them on fire. Needless to say, I…,. was too broken-hearted to revisit that project in the following decades, but just lately I thought that this Phoenix could rise again from its ashes. I recovered fast enough to move back to my Louisiana plant and get active with the Venezuela project of 17 houses. Meanwhile that family company closed down or went bankrupt. Luc moved to Paris got married and got a job at the Canadian embassy . My mother had died and I was bombarded with so many ideas that I totally forgot about what I call today the ARO project.
Just two weeks ago I discovered to my dismay that the machine shop that made made key machine parts did not have any of my shop drawings. Another fabricator simply disappeared. I had lost a ton of photos, test results and texts, but still hoping to find a DHS tape or two of myself operating that machine that delivers finished logs, all meeting with R28+insulation standards. To my Credit, at 5:00 a.m. this morning I had rebuilt in a 3D animation the essential of my machine from MEMORY, enough to give me confidence in the fact that the ideas are powerful enough that what I have is adequate to convince, empower and find buyers amongst those 15 log homes manufacturers. After all, nothing has been published and all patents I have clear sailing ahead. This was the fact that I am adding enough robotic to my original concept to make this a modern piece of equipment complimenting the fact that I found enough of the test results and photos to make this incredible proposal.
And so I intend to release this project in our website next month as a test run for many others to follow more in the line of the shelters we have been talking about.
But I insist that I will also deliver in the same installment the entire refugee shelter section, hinting that our company will do pro bono work using part of our profits from the licensing scheme of the Aro project.