Re-manifesting the architectural manifesto: Claude Parent and Paul Virilio’s Architecture Principe magazine, 1966–1996

This article investigates the latent yet enduring influence of the Architecture Principe manifesto within architectural history and theory by critically examining its evolution across the original nine issues (1966–1977) and its reconstitution in the tenth issue (1996). Central to this analysis are the foundational concepts developed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio—namely the oblique function, the third urban order, habitable circulation, and the mediate city—which, though incompletely realised in their built projects, reverberate through the works of later architects. Drawing on archival materials from the FRAC Centre and the Claude Parent Archives, the article traces how the manifesto was progressively disassembled and recontextualised, with its conceptual fragments continuing to exert influence. Through this trajectory, the paper argues that the oblique's transformation constitutes not a rupture, but an evolution, wherein unfulfilled ideas from Architecture Principe were absorbed and reworked within new architectural paradigms. By bridging the manifesto's original formulation with its contemporary ramifications, the article positions manifestos not as static, author-bound declarations but as dynamic, living media that operate through intertextual and transhistorical networks. In doing so, it calls for renewed methodological approaches to architectural manifestos—approaches that recognise their generative capacities, their entanglements with other discourses, and their ongoing potential to inform architectural practice and speculation.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Journal of Architecture

• Publication date

  2025-01-02

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/13602365.2025.2558866
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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