Toward a Theory of Critical Modernity: The Post-Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

Claude Parent is a utopian modernist French architect, and creator (with Paul Virilio) of the theory of oblique architecture, or the theory of the function of the oblique. He has been a polemicist, writer and self-publicist extraordinaire and professional architect for more than sixty years. His partnership with Paul Virilio, the self-styled “critic of the art of technology,” their work on oblique architecture from 1963-1969 and its implications for Parent’s theory of critical modernity, are the main subject of this essay.