Claude Parent, Possibilités Obliques
“If you want to soar, to see the world from above in its entirety without losing the earthly sensations of walking through mud, then become an architect. Practice research, track down the imaginary. Venture into theory, remain awake in your dreams, leave ‘two and two make four’ to others, choose chaos instead.
Work within illusion.
You will no doubt wander in this realm for many long years; you will exhaust yourself trying to move stubborn mountains; you will often doubt your mental health. But at the end of this wandering you will find your dwelling, your mythical castle, and through the gaping doorway you will enter architecture standing upright: that place inaccessible to ordinary mortals.
Others possess power, money, pleasure, glory, happiness. You, you have nothing, but you stand at the source of liberation in the ways of living and thinking. You will be mobile; you will shift what cannot be moved; you will cross the Mediterranean; you will topple every citadel; you will render continuous the fractured surface of the planet, then fracture it again at will; you will practice reversal; you will love the fragment far more than the whole; you will be an architect… Good luck.”
Claude Parent, excerpt from his essay “Errer dans l’Illusion”.
The exhibition brings together eight major original drawings by Claude Parent, produced between 1988 and 2011.
Claude Parent (1923–2016) stands as one of the most influential architects and theorists of the second half of the twentieth century. His work is marked by a decisive break with modernist orthogonality and by the elaboration of the concept of the Oblique, developed in collaboration with Paul Virilio between 1963 and 1968 through the journal Architecture Principe. Over the course of his career, Parent consistently sought to translate this theoretical framework into built form, pursuing an architecture grounded in movement, inclination, and spatial instability.
The significance of his thinking has been widely acknowledged by subsequent generations of architects, including Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Wolf D. Prix, and Rem Koolhaas, all of whom have recognized the formative impact of his work on contemporary architectural discourse.
Within Parent’s practice, drawing occupies an autonomous and fundamental position. The works assembled here testify not only to their exceptional graphic rigor but also to the full fictional dimension of the Oblique. Fiction is understood here not as a departure from reality, but as an operative mode that enables dissociations, reconfigurations, and new articulations of space, time, and relational structures. In this sense, fiction functions as a critical instrument for rethinking the real, rather than negating it.
The exhibition dossier brings together biographical reference points alongside a selection of texts by Claude Parent published in his manifesto journal Architecture Principe between 1963 and 1968. Taken together, these writings and drawings articulate a profoundly political conception of architecture, in which architectural fiction, grounded in the logic of the slope, seeks to counter inertia and alienation by restoring movement as a fundamental condition of lived experience.
