Claude Parent: Visionary Architect

Claude Parent’s (1923-2016) injunction to architects called them to “open the imaginary,” “dislodge the immobile,” “surf on the surface,” and “limit without closing.” In a life dedicated to provoking new alternatives to how life might be lived through drawing, Parent transformed the direction of architecture and influenced many of the most radical contemporary practitioners, from Thom Mayne to Jean Nouvel, to Zaha Hadid.  SCI-Arc History Theory Faculty John Cooper and Chloé Parent (Claude Parent’s daughter) discuss the exhibition Claude Parent: Visionary Architect curated and designed by Laszlo Parent and Sara Benrahmoun on display in the Kappe Library at SCI-Arc in Fall 2019 which included a physical remaking of a structure Parent originally designed for his family home to demonstrate his fundamental theory of architecture: the oblique.  A demolishing critique of conventional orthogonal architecture, the oblique was first theorized by Parent and the philosopher Paul Virilio in the wa