MAISON DRUSCH

Maison Drusch

Exploring one of Claude Parent’s best works in the Versailles suburbs.

In the heart of Versailles, one building in particular stands out. Disrupting the 19th-century villas and chocolate-box homes with its concrete-and-glass silhouette, Maison Drusch is arguably the purest work of Claude Parent, who spent the years after its 1963 construction refining the daring ideas it contains. Now an icon of French 20th-century architecture, it remains little known abroad despite praise from Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.

Parent began as an aeronautical engineer before a brief, “suffocating” stint with Le Corbusier and the launch of his own office in 1956. By 1963 industrialist Gaston Drusch commissioned a house on a thin, forested plot in Versailles; the result crystallised Parent’s polemical theories.

In 1965 the project, interchangeably called Maison or Villa Drusch, was complete. The living room hangs from a single corner, as if a béton-brut block were sliced and tipped. Stairs run parallel to the roof line, concrete hovers beside broad sheets of glass, and style labels fall short: the villa speaks its own language.

Here lie the first applications of the Fonction Oblique, later formalised with philosopher Paul Virilio in their Architecture Principe group (1963-68). Ramps and gradients replace vertical walls, inviting movement and echoing the Atlantic Wall bunkers the pair studied after the war.

Now an icon of French 20th-century architecture, it remains little known abroad despite praise from Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.

Unlike those bunkers, the Drusch villa remains largely unchanged, still with its lap pool, angular bookshelves and oblique storage. Yet only one of Parent’s buildings enjoys protected status; others have been remodelled or demolished.

Architecture slowly caught up: Maison Drusch seeded the post-modern and deconstructivist experiments of the 1980s and beyond. Parent kept drawing, teaching and provoking until his death in 2016, content to stay a trailblazer at the edge of mainstream discourse.