CLAUDE PARENT (1923–2016)

The father of Oblique architecture, Claude Parent, whose vertiginous approach to creating space influenced the work of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and of course, his protégé, Jean Nouvel, died on Saturday, February 27.

While in his thirties, Parent, along with his friend the philosopher Paul Virilio, discovered bunker units built by the Nazis along the Atlantic Wall in France that, over time and during severe bouts of inclement weather, had unmoored themselves, which caused them to slip and tumble throughout the dunes. When Parent entered one of these topsy-turvy bunkers, his equilibrium was entirely thrown off: walls, floors, and ceilings blurred into one another; up and down were entirely confused, reversed. It was an experience so dizzying and profound that, from there on out, he decided to build his edifices on imbalanced, sloping grounds, as a way to radicalize a body’s experience within built structures. This idea, developed with Virilio in the 1960s, came to be known as Oblique architecture, a theory of architecture that, though lauded by artists and cultural theorists (he was invited to create a project for the French pavilion in the 1970 Venice Biennale), also aided in dampening a relatively lucrative commercial career.

Nonetheless, he received commissions: among them the Maison Drusch in Versailles (considered the first Oblique house); the Sainte Bernadette du Banlay church in Nevers; the Lycée Vincent d’Indy in Paris; and even a nuclear power plant in Lorraine. Parent was also the recipient of numerous French awards and honors: He was given the Grand National Prize for Architecture in 1979; made an officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honor in 1990, then a commander in 2010; and was inducted into the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005.