T N E PAR chitect
E ar y D r a n U A isio v L C
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Église Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay Nevers, France (1963-1966) Sainte-Bernadette church of the Banlay in Nevers materializes the coincidence of two researches: the "archaeological" work of Paul Virilio on the bunkers of the Atlantic wall and Claude Parent's research on the critique of the modern plan through the exploration of breakage and change. The church of Banlay affirms the fracture of two heavy masses rising cantilever on a central pillar which constitutes the point of articulation. For Parent, it's a "flaw". Determining element in the development of the project, the fracture makes it possible to rethink, in the same tension, unity in the discontinuity of space. SainteBernadette is a sacred space in which military language is established in the paradox: the bunker as a figure of oppression and refuge, the cave as incarnation of the origin of humanity but also of the tomb, the Church as a symbol of introspection and ascension to light. 8
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IN ONE STROKE FrĂŠdĂŠric Migayrou Claude Parent draws, he draws houses whose plans he shakes around, and he draws, in a heavy and dense ink, figures which bring about a soft brutalism, a boldness soon after transcribed in steel structures, then in concrete. But the surfaces are in the way and can no longer be limited, as they are absurdly reduced to the measure of their functions. The hand is quickly more demanding, taking over the space and working in the open. Lines draw out, tighten, disrupt the Euclidean order, topple shapes over, move horizons to brake into discontinuities and loose themselves in fractures. The design struggles to keep up with the forcefulness of the move, it thickens, rips, looks for other directions, other endings, so that the architect accentuates the line, exhausts it, wrings it out and forges it to his hand, diverts it in obliques in order to free other expanses. To draw the Oblique is to free space, enlarge it, give it time, find interstitial areas, spot the voids and displace, in one furious strike of the pen or pencil, the fixity of all measures and notations. Claude Parent pencils, he sharpies, he pushes the lines back again, creates interlacings and knots, rips open the objects of architecture to make room, to increase spatialities, to qualify new dynamics he invents names for. As he draws, he splits, he cuts, he crushes the black of the ink or of the lead tip, scratches the surfaces to give birth, out of this density, to openings, vanishing perspectives and areas of freedom. The architect is a demiurge, he draws worlds that offer themselves as possible utopias, but utopias that are real and where the drawing guides us, outside any representation, stimulates other types of intelligence, where the drawing is inhabited, habitable, and invites us to deploy our cognitive acuteness, to tip our bodies over in infinite extensions.
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Claude Parent incises, he slashes the space, cuts it up in strips and ribbons, he stretches it, rips it and mends it, pierces it with improbable axialities in order to project huge «topo-graphies, to make hypothetical topos appear in the far reaches of the «geo-metric». Within the confines of architecture, the drawing, with all its technicities, the drawing as a construction, as a shaping, the drawing even brought back to the dazzling speed of a sketch, sets itself up as the ultimate obstacle, trapped in the snare of the descriptive. Then Claude Parent pinpoints, he looks for the incidence, makes of inscription an active principle in order to free the access to other dimensions, to a vector space that forces the line to explore the possibilities of such an algebrization of the geometric - the drawing being then considered as an experience of its limits. Working on the incidence, looking for the perfect angle that allows to tackle a surface, to reveal its multiple extensions, Claude Parent vectorizes the drawing and combines structures that organize themselves in a configuration of rich architectures. The pencil dematerializes and is now a mere stylus that pinpoints, leads and misleads, and the black lead draws from this use an ultimate efficiency that anticipates the maps and graphs which today multiply ad infinitum our habitus and geographies. The architect had extrapolated this irreversible mutation, the ultimate danger of expropriation of the territories that form our rationalized urbanities, a world in which there would be no room for us anymore, since we can’t take on and think of the alternative to a new spatial order. He had then decided to take a hand, to outline possibilities into as many visions that appear to us now as resources, as benevolent recommendations regarding the common practices of a civilization to come. We are left with the abiding hope that these rich drawings call to mind in setting forth new typologies, a grammar for architecture to come, provisions for the present and the future... But Claude Parent being absent, faces turn to lead.
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FREE ARCHITECTURE Donatien Grau
These drawings, and, as a matter of fact, all of Claude Parent’s, do not abide by a restricted definition of architecture. In the last three decades of his life, after he closed his studio, his work was liberated from the necessity to build for people, he could let go of it, and therefore engage with what really was, in his view, the subject of architecture: how human beings live, how they can be left in the jail
Claude Parent used to say that drawing was the form in which he
of boredom, or how they can somehow be induced to become more
experienced no constraint whatsoever, and therefore, quite naturally,
humane, more themselves, more self-aware. In his view, architecture
his favorite: no one could dictate him what he should say or think, he
was always political, in the highest sense of the word; it allowed
was free to experience the realm, not of fantasy, but of possibility. He
to properly live one’s life in the city of humanity. In these last three
did not have to convince people of something they would never buy
decades, he manifested himself as what he had been all those years
into, nor did he have to confront himself to the reactions – and often,
long: the prophet of our condition.
for most of his career, the animosity – or his peers-architects. Through
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the line of drawing, he could push his thoughts, his use of reason as
Everyone who knew Claude Parent and spoke with him is aware of
far he humanly could. And indeed, he foresaw, in the 1990s onwards,
how much he had suffered from the constraints that had been applied
much of what has happened since: notably, the migrations of humans
to him, and which limited the number of buildings he was able to
through valleys, deserts and seas. In the early 2000s, when no one
actually build: people were not nearly as free as he was. His influence
was yet envisaging what was to become the greatest European and
over today’s preeminent architects – any of the “big names”: Jean
international emergency of the 2010s, he began to work on a series of
Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, the late Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando,
drawings featuring the movements of populations, which had had to
Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, etc. and so many more - is inversely
leave their home, at that point inhabitable. Looking at these drawings
proportionate to the number of edifices that bear his signature. And
of human beings, they can be identified one by one, formed with slight
most are in fact private houses; but there were also shopping centers,
traces of pencil, one cannot help but be extremely moved, and admire
nuclear power stations, and famously, a church – Sainte-Bernadette
the prescience of a mind who was, after all, that of an architect.
in Nevers.
There is a reason for this influence: he understood something
commissioner, to the location, to all the facts that make architecture
architects are often not offered nor even allowed to take into
an art of method rather than of the system. The greatest succeed in
consideration, the fact that architecture is not about buildings per
bringing in this questioning on our life, and the incitation to improve
se. It is about the home we find for ourselves, what it makes possible
and enhance it, in one form or another. But to them Claude Parent
for us, and what it prevents us from experiencing. The presences of
is a model of pure concern for human life. Nothing else mattered to
Parent’s actual “built work” are far from insignificant: houses are where
him than the necessity to make the experience of being human fuller,
individuals live physically; a church, where they live metaphysically;
more complete, more conscious. This is the very root of the “oblique
a shopping center where they find the goods from which to live; a
function” he developed through the 1960s with theorist Paul Virilio.
nuclear power station where energy for that very life is to be invented.
The premise was simple: when human bodies live on a horizontal
He conceived several plans for museums, including one of his very last
ground, they cannot be aware of themselves. They walk, simply, they
projects, but each was turning the museum structure against itself:
are left in a form of laziness of the body and therefore of life in its entirety.
the emphasis was never placed on the collection, on the art, on what
What they suggested – and indeed built – was for the ground to be
there is to see, but on the human experience at a location in which
slightly inclined, so that the human body would have to consistently
humans are metaphysically and culturally invited to become more
adjust its positioning. It would need to learn to live in instability, and
aware. In the same way as the architecture of the Nevers church does
therefore in full consciousness. The Sainte-Bernadette church in
not owe much to the cult of the actual Sainte Bernadette, the structure
Nevers is the masterpiece of the kind. It also made any location, even
of the unrealized museum is not tied to its collection – normally the
the most domestic, into a theater of sorts. In Claude Parent’s world,
very basis of such an institution.
life was performative: in order to be fully lived, it required a complete sense of who one was, and of how one presented oneself to the world.
Most architects are unable to enact the humanness of architecture;
At the time of a great construction boom post-World War II, Claude
because of all the constraints due to the commission, to the
Parent presented an alternative. 17
Previous spread: Open Limit II, 1999-2000 Pencil on paper, 150 x 250 cm Series: Open Limit
Right: Open Limit VIII, 1999-2000 Pencil on paper, 150 x 250 cm Series: Open Limit
Following spread: Open Limit X, 1999-2000 Pencil on paper, 150 x 250 cm Series: Open Limit
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Left: Affichage Urbain, Champs-ÉlysÊes, 1972 Top: Affichage Urbain, Raspail, 1972 Right: Affichage Urbain, Marignan, 1972
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CLAUDE PARENT VISIONARY ARCHITECT EDITED BY CHLOÉ PARENT CONTRIBUTIONS BY FRANK GEHRY, AZZEDINE ALAÏA, JEAN NOUVEL, WOLF D. PRIX, DONATIEN GRAU, FRÉDÉRIC MIGAYROU, AND ODILE DECQ, AMONG OTHERS
Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com ISBN: 978-0-8478-6215-3 $65.00 Cloth HC, 10 x 12 1/2 inches 176 pages 120 illustrations Rights: World
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