Claude Parent: Architectural Work, Graphic Work
20.01.2010 - 02.05.2010
Cite de l'architecture et du patrimoine, 1, Place du Trocadero et du 11 Novembre, 75116 Paris , France
In Claude Parent s case, a solo exhibit could be strictly "biographical", given that this architect is an important figure in the life of the world.
His architectural activity, which began in 1956 and ended only about 10 years ago, counts almost as much through his production of buildings that have become architectural icons ? one need only mention the Drusch house, the Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay church and the Iran Center at the Cite Universitaire Internationale - as through the encounters that marked him, encounters with personalities as varied as Andre Bloc, Ionel Schein, Nicolas Schoffer, Yves Klein, Sylvia Monfort, Jean Tinguely...
Each of them determined entire stretches, "periods" one might say, of the production of an architect who was and remains a peerless illustrator, as well as a polemicist and caricaturist in his spare time.
So many facets of a body of work that have challenged, even disturbed, his contemporaries. Which explains perhaps that the recognition of Claude Parent has only arrived today, with this large-scale retrospective that the Cite de l architecture & du patrimoine is dedicating to him, and which is also the first.
Such recognition first of all honors the growing influence of the man who was first an almost "marginal" avant-garde creator and that today s events have put back into the heart of current architectural debates. It is for this eminently symbolic reason that Jean Nouvel, whose career began in Claude Parent s agency, is the exhibition s scenographer, after having dedicated his project for the Paris Philharmonia to Claude Parent. |
January 2010
