Claude Parent, a celebrated French architect and Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, died on the evening of the 27th February 2016, the day after his 93rd birthday. Born in 1923 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Parent was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and, throughout his career, developed a limited but extremely influential body of built work ranging from nuclear power stations to shockingly unconventional shopping centers, such as his project in Sens. Described as both a utopian and a 'supermodernist' in his own lifetime, the methodology he shaped has played a significant role for his peers of all generations and for contemporary artists and thinkers including Jean Nouvel, who began his professional life as a collaborator.
The promises he offers remain largely to be explored.
Once a student of Le Corbusier, Parent spent his entire career thinking carefully about—and, indeed, actually changing at times—the ways in which people live. He sought to create an 'unbalance' in an attempt to make people aware of their own being. Alongside philosopher Paul Virilio, Parent was the practician and theoretician of the 'oblique function'. Through his writing he sought to define the activity of being an architect, and through his drawings, "devoted himself to the movements of populations and to the structures of our world, to expand reflection on the future of human life on earth."
News via Claudine Colin Communication
