Architect, polemicist and theoretician, Claude Parent was the first person in France to make a sharp epistemological break with modernism, beginning in the mid 1950s.

From the Maison Drusch (1963) all the way to his project for the Musée du Prado (1995), he has sought to create discontinuity by shifting and tipping volumes and by fracturing of the plan.

In 1970, he curates and designs the French Pavilion at the 35th Venice Art Biennale, Italy, inviting artists such as Gérard Mannoni, Gilles Ehrmann, Samuel Buri; François Morellet, Andrée Bellaguet, Jean-Pierre Cousin and Charles Maussion.

In 1974, a few months after the oil crisis, EDF (France's production and distribution power company), Parent, 47, is entrusted with the coordination of a group of architects including, among others Paul Andreu, Jean Willerval and Roger Taillibert.

Demanding, critical, provocative and fiercely obstinate, Claude Parent has continuously proposed places of contradiction generating doubt and disquiet and excluding any sort of passiveness with regard to architecture.