Architecture has become a major issue for living together. The disturbing reduction of our planet's possibilities with its global warming, with its necessary questioning of what growth implies, what a territory, a city, or even a simple building is, pushed us to tackle, for Drawing Now, the particular theme of architecture.
This is why we decided to bring together the original drawings of one of the most innovative theoretical architects of the 1970s-2000s, a historical figure in architecture: Claude Parent (1923-2016). Claude Parent has the rare distinction of having been both an artist and an architect. As an artist, he has developed throughout his career an original work of drawing in graphite or Indian ink, which are the reflection of his humanist research, concerns or visions of the world, sometimes utopian, often concrete, answers to the major problems of our societies. While some of the drawings in Indian ink are like free extrapolations of an architecture that has become a landscape, sometimes highly stylized or even abstract, others more detailed tackle head-on the major political issues of our world: migration, the possibility of a city reinvented by its osmosis with the environment and the future livelihood of the world's populations. Far from being illustrations, Claude Parent's drawings are charged with power, messages, and sometimes even anger. Alongside the architectural work, they constitute an artistic work in their own right, some of which was presented at the Cité de l'architecture during its 2010 exhibition.
The set selected for Drawing Now, never presented before and directly from his archives, brings together some thirty drawings by Claude Parent. It will offer collectors a striking glimpse of an artist and architect who never ceased to think differently about our world.