Claude Parent

On the occasion of the book release of Claude Parent: Visionary Architect (Rizzoli New York), we are pleased to invite you to the exhibition Claude Parent: Visionary Architect, held at SCI-Arc’s Kappe library, celebrating the work of French architect Claude Parent. The exhibition includes a full- scale ramp installation based on the architect’s own oblique apartment interior, and presents a selection of never before seen original drawings and sketches, as well as photographs of iconic projects and publications on Parent’s work.

The exhibition opens on October 25, 2019 with a book presentation and conversation between special guests Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Neil Denari, Deborah Richmond, Michele Saee, and Hernan Diaz Alonso. The authors Chloé and Laszlo Parent will also be in attendance.
Architect and theoretician Claude Parent was the first in France to make a sharp break with modernism beginning in the 1950s. Through books, manifesto-drawings, and built projects, his work has enabled new conceptualizations and understandings of space. Parent’s manifesto, the Oblique Function Theory, developed with Paul Virilio in 1963, dictated that buildings should use slopes, reject orthogonality, be wall-free where possible, and have  predominance of space over surface. One of the most pivotal and radical architects of the twentieth century, his work influenced leading architects such as Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind, and Nouvel, who consider him a precursor. Some of his iconic built works include the Villa Bloc in Antibes (1962), the Drusch House in Versailles (1965), the Sainte-Bernadette church in Nevers (1966), the Fondation Avicenne in Paris (1968), and the oblique superstores of Sens and Ris-Orangis (1971).