Architecture Principe no.1, February, Paris

Opening the shiny black cover of the first issue of Architecture Principe, the reader finds not an introduction but a warning. Described as the “permanent manifesto of the group Architecture Principe,” nine brief issues appeared in the last nine months of 1966, all of which were devoted to the theoretical writings and architectural projects of the editors Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. Architecture Principe stressed the urgent need for architectural culture to come to terms with the transformed spatial conditions ushered in by the Second World War and exacerbated by post-war developments in military and communications technologies. Brief theoretical manifestos appeared regularly in the magazine; the first of which, “La Fonction Oblique” reconsidered the importance of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and the oblique axis, a development that the editors heralded as the platform for creating a “new urban order” if not the “total reinvention of the architectural vocabulary.” Programmatic texts were routinely paired with theoretical diagrams and with panoramic drawings of the new urban order they envisioned. Yet the editors’ confidence in the advent of a new urban order rarely strays from a sense of foreboding about how such fundamental transformations will impact human existence. The apocalyptic and liberatory tone of the magazine is explicit in the first issue’s “warning:” “The state of crisis evidently taking place in all human activities, the return to a principle of unity that overturns every classification, every limit, the enormous contraction of values and of disciplines, signals the proximity of an event, perhaps without precedent. Historically we have already observed numerous modifications of societies, never have we witnessed the modification of man himself.” CB

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