This month’s issue features Claude Parent, one of France’s most revered modernist architects and an elected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In the mid-1960s Parent devised a theory, along with critic Paul Virilio, called the fonction oblique, for which he is most famous. This declared that buildings should be all about ramps, slopes and angles, wall-free where possible; that space should predominate over surface.
More radical ideas called for the creation of the ‘oblique city’, which looked like a giant concrete wave, and in 1968 the duo almost got away with suspending themselves in mid-air in two isolated tilted cells as an ‘experiment in living’.
Alongside some of the more outré ideas, though, Parent put his theory into practice and created some incredible, experimental and iconic buildings. Click on the images below to see more:
Villa Drusch
Villa Drusch in Versailles is a rectangular concrete box of a house, propped up improbably on one of its corners. Built in 1963 for local industrialist Gaston Drusch, it’s all tricky angles and open spaces, and the outdoor lap pool, which Drusch used to jump into from his bedroom window, looks as contemporary as anything today.
The church of Sainte Bernadette du Banlay
A year after Villa Drusch, Parent embarked upon one of his most ‘scandalous’ buildings, the church of Sainte Bernadette du Banlay in the town of Nevers. With an exterior like a Nazi bunker and a near-empty interior except for a few pews and haphazard stained-glass windows, it’s an imposing sight, but despite the love-it-or-loathe-it reactions it causes, it’s a listed building.
Maision Bordeaux le Pecq
The amazing Maision Bordeaux le Pecq is in Bois le Roy, a nondescript Normandy village about an hour outside Paris. With its sloping pagoda-like roof, the house rises out of a stunning ten-acre site; inside, it consists almost entirely of one large open space, with a small kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms off it. Parent created the house in 1963 for a formidable art patron called Andrée Bordeaux Le Pecq, who wanted it as her countryside studio and designed most of the interior herself.
INFORMATION
Biography
1923
Parent was born in Neuilly, Paris
1942
Studied architecture at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts à Paris, but didn’t complete his diploma
1952
Worked briefly at Le Corbusier’s office
1953
Set up as an architect with Ionel Schein
1962
Worked on his most famous project, La Maison de l’Iran (renamed Fondation Avicenne) at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris
1970
Was selected to design the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
2005
Joined the Académie des Beaux-Arts
