Claude Parent: An Oblique Lineage Toward Hypersurfaces
Projects and Drawings by Architects
January 15 through February 26, 2000
Louis Stern Fine Arts and Chloe Ziegler present an exhibition of architects' projects and renderings to be featured at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, January 15, 2000, from 6 to 9pm. Claude Parent and other architects featured in the show will be present. During the reception there will also be a booksigning for Stephen Perrella's Hypersurface 2, John Wiley & Sons.
Over the last few decades, architects and designers have used computers for both technical purposes and for the presentation of projects. Lately, however, the computer has been used not only as a tool, but as a device capable of encompassing the complexities of today's mediatic world, and in doing so has generated totally new and unexpected forms.
The work of French architect Claude Parent was recently rediscovered in the United States. He has been heralded as an early formative influence on this generation of younger architects, loosely associated here under the thematic name of hypersurface architecture. Parent is best known for his theory of the Oblique Function, which considers architecture as dynamic. Created in 1964, in collaboration with acclaimed French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, whose ideas examine the effects of technology on culture, the Oblique was based on the continuous and rigorous use of non-orthogonal surfaces, both on exterior and interior spaces.
Movement is at the heart of Parent's architecture, which he claims, "should always be on the verge of tipping over." Ideas of dynamism, flexibility, tactility, the weaving of planes like unending knitwear, and Parent's early interest in the culture of media, have found resonance with the theory of hypersurfaces in architecture, which investigates new potential relations between media and form. "Rather than creating an architecture that is essentially the organization of stationery, inert forms, […] spatial design [is viewed] as a highly plastic, flexible art in which the building form itself continuously evolves through motion and transformation" (Peter Zellner). This new approach produces infinite variations of highly unusual images-shapes, mapping intriguing and unexpected geographies.
Remarkable digital prints that have not yet been widely exhibited in art galleries or museums, will be shown for the first time on the West Coast. These are among the latest by an internationally celebrated group of architects, including Asymptote (who are designing the virtual Guggenheim for the year 2000), Coop Himmelb[l]au, Reiser+Umemoto, Diller+Scofidio, Stephen Perrella, etc.