Architect, theoretician, designer, polemicist, Claude Parent is a figure in the history of 20th century architecture who has cultivated a certain singularity. He was the first in France to make a profound epistemological break with modernism. Producing multiple articles, books, manifesto drawings and projects, he sought to defend his…

Architect, theoretician, designer, polemicist, Claude Parent is a figure in the history of 20th century architecture who has cultivated a certain singularity. He was the first in France to make a profound epistemological break with modernism. Producing multiple articles, books, manifesto drawings and projects, he sought to defend his "designs" to invite us to rethink our living environment. From his meeting with Paul Virilio was born the adventure of the "oblique function", namely the search for the use of the inclined plane in the structuring of space. Demanding, critical, provocative, of a fierce obstinacy, Claude Parent has never ceased to propose places of contradiction generating doubt, anxiety and instability, excluding any passivity in the face of architecture. His protean production, addressing all programs, including the most unexpected such as supermarkets and nuclear power plants, is considered here in a biographical continuum. Through the complexity of this character, an entire society is described with its still-lively ties to the past, its fantasies, its ambiguities, the place occupied by the artist-creator, the providential man, the one who through a gesture – architectural and urban – hopes to save the world.

Author: Audrey Jeanroy

Editor: Parentheses

Weight: 946 g
Dimensions: 24X 17.5 X 3 cm
Language: French