Background
Christian de Portzamparc was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1944, into a family of French Breton heritage.
(The Cite de la Musique in Paris (1984-1995) brought Chris...)
The Cite de la Musique in Paris (1984-1995) brought Christian de Portzamparc international fame. This complex appeals through the sculptured character of the individual buildings, the love of detail obvious throughout, and the subtle combination of materials. This monograph documents some of the most important recent buildings and projects of the Paris architect. In addition, the urban works of Portzamparc are highlighted, illustrated by projects.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/487140224X/?tag=2022091-20
(In 1994 the French architect Christian de Portzamparc won...)
In 1994 the French architect Christian de Portzamparc won the Pritzer Architecture Prize--the profession's equivalent to the Nobel Prize--crowning a career that began in 1971. Among the most important of his recent constructions are the Luis Vuitton building in New York, the Crédit Lyonnais Tower in Euralille, France, and the Nexus Kashii housing complex in Fukuoka, Japan. In addition to surveying de Portzamparc's many completed projects in depth, this lush volume reveals an unknown side of his work through secondary drawings, paintings and sketches.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2906571512/?tag=2022091-20
(At the pinnacle of his profession and powers, Christian d...)
At the pinnacle of his profession and powers, Christian de Portzamparc is a shining star in the firmament of high design. Pritzker Prizewinning architect Christian de Portzamparc is renowned for bold yet artful architecture that is at once sensitive to its context while at the same time being novel, adventurous, and frequently exciting. One57, the soaring residential skyscraper in New York, with unparalleled views of Central Park, is perhaps his most famous building in the United States, but his work ranges widely across the globe, from an extraordinary handkerchief puffshaped boutique for Christian Dior in Seoul to a low-winged arabesque of a building for the wine producer Cheval Blanc to a mysterious temple of the modern for Casarts in Casablanca. This volume, the first major comprehensive book on Portzamparcs work in more than three decades, is a revelation and a comprehensive survey of the work of one of the worlds most innovative and exciting architects at the height of his powers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0847848728/?tag=2022091-20
(The Open Block concept and its corollary luminous and div...)
The Open Block concept and its corollary luminous and diversified 'open street', as realised by Christian de Portzamparc in the 80s. is based on a set of flexible rules that allow for variations. Buildings are independent and set apart, but allow for the street to open onto the internal side of the open blocks where gardens are planted. All buildings' sides benefit from an exposure to fresh air and sunlight, while the wide variety of programs, volumes and materials is implemented along the entity of the street. This titles considers urban projects of Atelier Christian de Portzamparc where the 'open block' concept is fully realised.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2871432406/?tag=2022091-20
( The creative forms of literature and architecture appea...)
The creative forms of literature and architecture appear to be distinct, one constructing a world on the page, the other producing the world in which we live. It is a conscious act to read literature, but the effects of architecture can pass by unnoticed. Yet, despite such obvious differences, writers and architects share a dynamic with their readers and visitors that is unpredictably similar. Writing and Seeing Architecture unveils a candid conversation between Christian de Portzamparc, celebrated French architect, and influential theorist Philippe Sollers that challenges us to see the analogous nature of writing and architecture. Their fascinating discussion offers a renewal of visionary architectural thinking by invoking past literary ideals that sought to liberate society through the reinvention of writing itself. Urging that new rules be set for each creation rather than resorting to limitations of the capitalist society, the authors daring confrontation of the interactions between writing and designing a space forcefully demonstrates the importance of intellectuals and practitioners intervening in the public sphere. Christian de Portzamparc is an architect whose designs include the French Embassy in Germany, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the LVMH Tower in New York City. He was winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1994. Philippe Sollers is a novelist and critic whose journal Tel Quel (19601982) published Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Bernard-Henri Lévy. He is the author of many books, including The Park and Une Vie Divine. Catherine Tihanyis translations include One Must Also Be Hungarian by Adam Biro and The Story of Lynx by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Deborah Hauptmann is associate professor of architecture theory at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081664568X/?tag=2022091-20
Christian de Portzamparc was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1944, into a family of French Breton heritage.
He attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1962 to 1969, a traditionalist school where he studied architecture, and spent a year at Columbia University in 1966.
He opened his architectural firm in Paris in 1970. Over the next few years, France and French culture underwent major social upheavals, much of which either had given cause to or was the result of the student riots and national strikes in 1968. As a result, most architects of Portzamparc's generation veered to a more radical, leftist philosophy, and among them some had even began to believe that architecture could not be an mechanism for social revolution at all, that it was an inherently bourgeois art. Portzamparc's philosophy is a realistic merging of pragmatism and politics. "Architects participate in the positive construction of the world, " Portzamparc told Artforum's Sedofsky. "Once you have a program to realize, you participate in a society that implicitly recognizes the power that organizes it, the power that governs it. You have to take responsibility for this 'constructive' aspect, to dirty your hands in making the world and impacting on the quantity of order or disorder. " Grounded by just such ideas, within a short span of years Portzamparc was winning acclaim for his designs. In 1975 he was commissioned by the French New Architectural Program, and received accolades for his ballet school in Nanterre, France, which opened in 1987. It featured rehearsal studios, a performance hall, video library, dance club, and residence hall for students. He also designed the Cafe Beaubourg, opposite the famed Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou, which houses the country's stellar collection of modern art and also goes by the name the Palais Beaubourg. His patron for the project was Gilbert Costes, who was embroiled in a rivalry with his brother. The sibling had hired another famed French architect, Philippe Starck, to design to Cafe Costes not far away from the Beaubourg, and both became 1980-era hangouts for an arty, intellectual crowd. In the end, however, Cafe Beaubourg's design--in part done with Portzamparc's wife, Elizabeth Jardim Neves--emerged the victor when Cafe Costes became a clothing boutique. Acclaimed Public Housing Another work that vaulted Portzamparc to the attention of the international design community was his 1979 Rue des Hautes-Formes housing project, near the Rue Nationale in the southeast section of Paris. Its phases included a redesign for what had been typical block-style government-subsidized housing, a depressing, fortress-like space. One of the changes Portzamparc made was to add balconies and awnings to each apartment, "I shall never forget the happy faces of the first people to move into the rue des Hautes-Formes, " Portzamparc told Marie Christine Loriers in the Dutch architectural magazine Archis. Later Portzamparc won a commission to add to the complex, and constructed new low-rise residences on the Rue Nationale, adjacent to a new school and community center which he also designed. He united the space with an arch for its entrance-way, and revamped the roofs that oversee the central courtyard to redirect sunlight on the space onto which the apartments overlook. All of the new elements, wrote Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times, "give the place the serenity of an enclave without disconnecting it from the city outside. " Cite de la Musique In 1983 Portzamparc took first prize in the French government's "Grand Projets" competition for a cultural complex to be located in northeast Paris. The Grand Projets, or Grand Travaux, were a planned series of massive architectural public works, similar to imperial building projects in past centuries. The concept became the cultural beacon of the Socialist presidency of Francois Mitterand, elected in 1981, who with state funding launched and shepherded them to creation before leaving office in 1995. Among the other Grand Travaux were a new opera house at the Bastille and a controversial national library. Portzamparc's design was chosen for the Cite de la Musique, a complex situated in Paris's Parc de la Villette in what was once a meatpacking district. For this, Portzamparc designed two concert halls, administrative offices, a museum for France's collection of 4000-plus instruments, and dormitories for students at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance. The $120 million Cite project was started in 1984 and opened in successive phases though 1995, and unlike some of the Grand Travaux, was hailed as a success. Portzamparc's National Conservatory, for instance, featured an elliptical concert hall, spiral lobby, and other unusual design elements that reflect the architect's fascination with blending historical and futurist forms. Elsewhere, a smaller organrecital "hall's design fuses intimacy with grandeur, " wrote Muschamp of the New York Times. "The ceiling, a soaring yellow cone paneled with wooden acoustical baffles, holds players and listeners within one radiant embrace, conferring a sense of ritual at once familiar and urbane. " Muschamp was in the hall during an informal rehearsal that day, and wrote it was not just the string quartet's arrangement he sensed--"it was the sound of a city that has sheltered civilization for centuries, rehearsing to pass it on. " In Tune With Asian Aesthetics Portzamparc's particular reliance on space and light as integral design elements has won him prized commissions in Asia. These have included the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, and a 1991 apartment complex in Fukuoka, Japan. This latter project is remarkable for the way in which Portzamparc linked the buildings together with bridges and canals. He has also designed the bank offices of Credit Lyonnais in Lille, France--a skyscraper built above a railroad station--and was the architect of New York City's LVMH Tower. For this skyscraper--which serves as offices for the luxury-goods cartel Louis Vuitton-Moet Chandon-Hennessy--Portzamparc explained to Sedofsky in Artforum that "what was requested was a building that differed as much as possible from the Chanel building next door. " For such works Portzamparc has won several honors in his field. In 1990 he and two other prominent French architects, Philippe Stack and Jean Nouvel, were selected for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a space customarily given to esteemed visual artists who work within more accessible mediums of paint or clay. Portzamparc continued to win prestigious, historically significant commissions. One of these was a new French Embassy to Germany, constructed in the newly reunited country's redesignated capital of Berlin. Situated at the formerly unremarkable Pariser Platz, Portzamparc's diplomatic headquarters stands opposite both the American and British embassies, a symbolic nod to the post-World War II nations who occupied a divided West Germany and three-quarters of a divided Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Embassy, also near the celebrated Hotel Adlon, is slated to open in 2000 along with several other noteworthy structures in the revitalized city. Portzamparc is the author of two books, 1983's La Spatialite n'est plus interdite ("Spatiality Is No Longer Prohibited") and Genealogies des Formes/Genealogy of Forms, a bilingual work published in 1997.
(In 1994 the French architect Christian de Portzamparc won...)
( The creative forms of literature and architecture appea...)
(The Open Block concept and its corollary luminous and div...)
(At the pinnacle of his profession and powers, Christian d...)
(The Cite de la Musique in Paris (1984-1995) brought Chris...)
(Hard to find book)
Quotations:
"My house is not the wall, or the floor, or the roof, but the emptiness between. "
"An architect must remember that the people working or living in his building need space - to dream, to be quiet, to find beauty somewhere. "
"When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city. "
"We need to rediscover the essence of the meaning of 'the use. ' Architecture is, above all, here for a better living. Every gesture, every shape must be justified by various reasons that would reinforce their reason to be, their use, and will give more sense to their beauty. "
"In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen. "
"Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that. "
"When I am true to my inspiration, even fight for my design, the project always turns out well. "
He lives in Paris with his wife and two sons, keeps his office in the Montparnasse neighborhood, and continues to use his own unique language of forms to conceptualize his designs.
Christian de Portzamparc is married and has two sons.