Christian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urbanist. Portzamparc’s modern and elegant designs reflect his sensitivity to and understanding of the greater urban environment. He was the first French architect to win the Pritzker Prize in 1994.
Portzamparc’s interest in architecture and the built environment was stirred at a young age when he viewed sketches by Swiss architect Le Corbusier. He graduated from the National School of Arts, Paris in 1969 and has since been noted for his bold designs and artistic touch. Just out of school, he worked alongside a team of sociologists studying neighborhoods, buildings, and their inhabitants and how their physical living conditions did and did not meet their needs. Through that experience, Portzamparc came to view architecture not merely as a professional discipline but as a social responsibility.
Here are 15 projects by Christian de Portzamparc, that reflect his principle of sensitivity to the urban environment.
1. Paris Opera Ballet School
Location: Nanterre, France.
Type: Cultural Centre
Year: 1983 – 1987
Christian de Portzamparc was awarded the contract for this Cultural facility in Parc de Nanterre, near Paris (France). He designed three distinct buildings for this facility: the dance building, the teaching and administrative building, and the accommodation wing. A glass structure links the movement between the three sections and modulates relations between the city and the park. The teenagers and children are invited to explore a fourth world: a garden and courtyard with flowers. In the dance building, the grand spiral staircase leads up to dance studios positioned along a panoramic walkway, gradually revealing the various rooms, with distant views of the park. Portzamparc sees dance as a celebration of space and architecture as the medium of the movement.
2. Cite De La Musique – West Wing
Location: Paris, France.
Type: Cultural Centre
Year: 1984-1990
The west wing, completed in 1990, houses the Paris Conservatoire. It accommodates teaching facilities for 1,200 students over a surface area of 40,000 sq.m. More than 5,000 people work and teach here and the building attempts to provide a space for everyone (each discipline, each “tribe”, has its own quarters). The design creates a large network of movements and spaces where students can meet freely. It has an arrangement of 186 different rooms for studying, set around a garden, it also includes a small opera house, an organ hall and a multi-purpose orchestra hall.
3. Café Beaubourg
Location: Paris, France.
Type: Cafe
Year: 1985-1987
Set on the forecourt of the Georges Pompidou in Paris, Café Beaubourg was built in 1987. It is the transformation of the ground floor of three old Parisian buildings. This place that was once deserted and isolated in the evening, has now become a meeting place, and a center of urban life where everyone can relax, talk, watch or work. Christian de Portzamparc has worked as a painter and as an architect on this particular project.
4. Crédit Lyonnais Tower
Location: Lille, France.
Type: Office Tower
Year: 1991-1995
The Crédit Lyonnais tower is part of the Rem Koolhaas’ urban plan in Euralille. Christian de Portzamparc gave a strong image to the tower to meet the difficulties and prohibitions associated with this design program. The project was faced with multiple constraints. However, Portzamparc was able to overcome the constraints to finally arrive at a tower that exhibits an enigmatic, floating, changing sense effect.
5. Champs Libres
Location: Rennes, France.
Type: Cultural Centre
Year: 1993-2006
The Esplanade Charles de Gaulle was a parking lot before Edmond Hervé, the Mayor of Rennes chose it as the location for a single-site cultural center dedicated to science, history, and art. The building houses three major existing institutions: The Museum of Brittany, Scientific and Technical Centre, and a Municipal Library.
For the architectural competition in 1993, the architect wanted to conserve the visibility of each institution to give them a separate existence while linking them to generate the desired synergy. This formed the basis for his three-in-one concept, where each institution has its own separate form but comes together as a greater whole. The material palette chosen by the architect for this cultural facility includes colored concrete, white aluminum, and dark roof-cladding. These new buildings completely redefine the urban location of the Charles de Gaulle esplanade.
6. Extension of The Paris Convention Center
Location: Paris, France.
Type: Exhibition Hall
Year: 1994-1995
The project consisted of adding 40,000 sq.m to the existing, 2,400-seat auditorium, which dates back to 1973. The extended wing consists of exhibition spaces, a new auditorium, new offices as well as a commercial center. At the entrance, a large cone, set at a tangent, accommodates meeting rooms at different levels and a new auditorium in its upper section.
The sloping façade combined with the large balcony helped to gain wide exhibition space inside, and also assured easy evacuation of the auditorium to the outdoors by avoiding numerous internal fire escapes.
7. LVMH Tower
Location: New York, USA.
Type: Office Tower
Year: 1994-1999
This small tower houses the headquarters of the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy Group. The tower rises as a symbol of the brand on 57th Street. It is a play of prismatic vertical volumes made out of various types of glass. Christian de Portzamparc played on the complexity of Manhattan’s building regulations by using broken geometry to design the tower. Thereby, setting it apart from the rest of the towers in that area. He used white sanded glass for the windows to optimize the passage of light.
8. French Embassy Berlin
Location: Berlin, Germany.
Type: Administration
Year: 1997-2003
Christian de Portzamparc teamed up with Elizabeth de Portzamparc for the design of reception spaces and with Regis Guignard for landscaping to win the commission for the Embassy in 1997. Christian de Portzamparc wanted to dilate the closed suffocating site so that no office would be without natural light. His idea was to create a good place to live, work and unite. The architect gave the inside of this closed block the impression of a succession of spaces flowing from one space to another. The site accommodated seven buildings, and three gardens at various heights, offering light to all spaces. One of the main features of this design is the 16m high walkway that crosses the site and is lined with a vertical garden. These buildings are originally designed to house all of the functional connections between the various services. The architect creates multiple vistas and adds depth to the building by opening it out to views on all directions and allowing light to filter in. Portzamparc has highlighted the notion of creating ‘open blocks’ within a ‘closed island’.