Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeksind, Jean Nouvel and Wolf D Prix are among the architects paying tribute Claude Parent, creator of Oblique Architecture, who has died aged 93.
Described by Nouvel as the "Piranesi of this century", Parent passed away on 27 February 2016, the day after his 93rd birthday, in his hometown of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
With a career spanning over 70 years, Parent was one of France's most influential and subversive 20th-century architects, despite only designing a small number of completed buildings.
As a young architect he worked for Le Corbusier, but eventually rejected the older architect's ideas to develop his own theory.
"I was mean to him, telling him that his urbanism was worthless ? and maybe I was right, because entire cities inspired by his theory, made of grids of residential towers, did not work," said Parent in a 2013 interview with Purple magazine. Parent's theory was called Oblique Architecture, and championed a move from horizontal and vertical architecture into spaces defined by slopes and ramps. His primary concern was unbalanced spaces.
"Claude Parent was one of architecture's most radical and audacious visionaries; audacious enough to question orthogonality as architecture's natural realm, and propose the tilted plane as the engine of invention and surprisingly fertile basis of an alternative architectural scenario," Zaha Hadid told Dezeen.
His few well-known built projects include the Brutalist concrete Church...