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"My talk will describe my relationship with architectural research. At the end of my studies, I took part in research into the lived experience of inhabited spaces as part of Jacqueline Palmade and Francoise Lugassy's team. The team's analysts analyzed daydreams practiced with residents according to Freudian or Marxist grids. For my part, I heard a general complaint about space. It soon became clear to me that what was essential in the city, in space, could not be understood solely through the categories of language. I submitted a research project to Corda entitled Des unités signifiantes dans la ville. It was accepted. I was interested in what we perceive of a city, in what makes up its form, in what an urban form is. I wanted to analyze the question using a method close to Gestaltpsychology, to the perception of space, without bringing it closer to semiology. In the same months, I designed a water tower in Marne-la-Vallée. And it was then that I realized I had to choose: create and build, or research and write. At the time, I didn't know how to mobilize my brain in these two equally important fields at the same time... So I chose to build and branched off. And yet, as I made my projects, this abandoned research was still present, as if it had been a program for me, and successive projects were steps forward in a progressing understanding. Since then, I've regularly asked myself this question, which should agitate every architect and lead some to do research: what's the use of an architect in our time, what's his knowledge, his method? And what is this age?
Christian de Portzamparc is an architect and urban planner. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he was briefly involved in housing research. In 1980, he set up his own practice in Paris, at the helm of which he has completed a number of landmark projects, including the Cité de la Musique, the École de danse de l'Opéra, the Philharmonie du Luxembourg, the French Embassy in Berlin, the LVMH Tower in New York and the Cité de la Musique in Rio de Janeiro. After winning the Pritzker Prize in 1994, he was awarded the Grand Prix National d'Architecture in 1998 and the Grand Prix de l'Urbanisme in 2004. In 2006, he became the first holder of the Artistic Creation Chair at the Collège de France.
