Christian de Portzamparc

Total Projects from Christian de Portzamparc: 3

Christian de Portzamparc has certainly contributed to the making of his own myth. Boyish good looks, smouldering dark eyes and his trademark raincoat and fedora make him as near as architecture gets to a pin-up. Born in Casablanca in 1944, he moved to Marseilles with his parents when he was just a few months old, training in the 1960s at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his early influences were the canonical Modernist names, particularly Le Corbusier.

De Portzamparc was one of a generation of French architects who benefited from François Mitterrand's Grands Projets in the 1980s and 1990s. He had produced an eclectic body of early work, his most important project probably being the Hautes-Formes affordable housing in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, completed in 1979 with Giorgia Benamo. The award in 1985 of the Cité de la Musique, a huge complex comprising concert halls, a museum and offices completed in 1995, was a coup and the project made de Portzamparc's name. The building is arranged around two large streets, from which all the facilities are accessible, a product of de Portzamparc's concept of buildings as fragments of the city around them. The west façade, however, with its monumental curved form and reflecting water pools, resembles strongly a watered-down version of Le Corbusier's Chandigarh Assembly, a building not known for its integration with the urban context.

It is somewhat revealing that de Portzamparc became the first (and so far only) French laureate of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's richest honour, at the age of just fifty. His work is nowhere near as challenging or influential as that of Jean Nouvel, and his Corbusian form-making and addiction to corporate-style atriums (as at his Opéra Dance School in Nanterre, completed in 1987, or the large, arcing internal street at the Cité de la Musique) do not suggest a truly individual voice.

Having completed extensions to the Palais des Congrès in Paris and the Palais de Justice in Grasse (both 1999), his practice made a quantum leap with the headquarters tower for Louis Vuitton in New York (also 1999). The folded façade was genuinely a radical break for curtain-walled office towers in Manhattan, dealing with the massing of the building and helping to temper the problem of reflection that plagues tall glass buildings. The practice worked carefully with New York's zoning laws, setting back the upper floors to create the tallest building in the area at twenty-three storeys, topped by a dramatic three-storey room looking towards Central Park. Although the interiors were designed by other architects, the job took de Portzamparc into the league of architects who can handle large corporate commissions in the US.

More recently, de Portzamparc has been commissioned to construct the Luxembourg Philharmonic building, the French Embassy in Berlin and the extension to the Pathé Tushinski Cinema in Amsterdam, indicating that, while he remains a house architect for French institutions, his influence is becoming more international. Despite his relative youth, he is a French architect of the old school, with a formal vocabulary that appeals to and reassures his many public clients.

website: www.chdeportzamparc.com

Featured Projects

	Hotel Renaissance Marriott Address: Avenue de Wagram 39-41 , PARIS - France Architect: Christian de Portzamparc Category: Hotels \| Retail



	Musée Hergé Address: Rue du Labrador 26 , LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE - Belgium Architect: Christian de Portzamparc Category: Cultural \| Museums



	Philharmonie Luxembourg Address: Place de l'Europe 1 , LUXEMBOURG - Luxembourg Architect: Christian de Portzamparc Category: Cultural