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SIMULACRA
ARCHITECTURESB-ARC-002

Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay

Claude Parent + Paul Virilio · 1963–1966

OVERVIEW

A parish church in Nevers, built 1963 to 1966 by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio under the name Architecture Principe. It is the first building of their fonction oblique: the idea that a floor should be inclined rather than flat, so that the body is never at rest and circulation becomes the subject of the plan.

The nave is two shells of board-marked concrete that appear to have been split and pushed apart. Inside, the ground rises and falls in two ramped halves meeting at a low point, so the congregation stands on a slope facing a slope.

WHY IT MATTERS

Architecture as destabilization: sloped planes and bunker mass turned into spatial psychology.

CONTEXT

Virilio had spent the late 1950s photographing the abandoned German bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, published later as Bunker Archéologie. The church is that research built: a windowless mass, light admitted through slots at the junctions, an entrance that works like a bunker's dog-leg rather than a door in a facade.

Architecture Principe lasted from 1963 to 1968 and produced few buildings. Parent went on to work on French nuclear power stations; Virilio left architecture for writing on speed, war and perception.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01The floor is the argumentNothing inside is level. The oblique is not a ramp to somewhere, it is the room. Watch how it makes standing a decision rather than a default.
  2. 02Light at the seamThere are no windows in the usual sense. Daylight enters where the two shells fail to meet, so the illumination reads as a structural fact rather than an opening.
  3. 03Board marks left inThe shuttering grain is legible across the whole exterior. Parent and Virilio did not rub it back; the formwork is the finish and the building is a record of how it was poured.
  4. 04No facadeThe mass is roughly the same from every side and gives no front. You find the entrance by walking around it, which is the bunker's logic applied to a church.

CONNECTIONS

  • BOARD-FORMED CONCRETEBrion Cemetery / Carlo Scarpa

    Both leave the formwork grain as the finish, and both use it to make mass feel deliberate. Scarpa's is cut and stepped at every edge; Parent and Virilio's is left whole, as a single poured shell.

  • BUNKER INTERIORSilo / Graham Yost

    A windowless concrete volume entered sideways, lit only where the structure fails to meet. Virilio built it from the Atlantic Wall; the series uses the same logic as a set for confinement.

EXPLORE FURTHER

RELATED SIGNALS

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