(b Casablanca, 1944). French architect and designer. He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1969 and won recognition in 1973 with a vegetal château d’eau at Marne-la-Vallée, a utilitarian construction that he interpreted as a landmark in the new city, in keeping with the preoccupations of the 1970s with the urban and symbolic dimensions of architecture. His next designs, executed and unexecuted, were evidence of his rejection of functionalism through a continuing concern for a volumetric architecture, for example the Hautes-Formes (1979) in Paris, in Marne-la-Vallée (1981) and in the Mandinet (1986), which challenged the equation between exterior and interior and exploited certain traditional values such as the street and the square, which here became urban interiors. Through this approach Portzamparc’s work became part of the Post-modernist movement, through his formal vocabulary rather than from his use of classical references. In the reconstruction of an urban fabric, for example the Foyer de la Rue des Rentiers (1984) or the Conservatoire de Musique (1984) in Rue Jean Nicot, both in Paris, Portzamparc still pursued his obsession with fragmentation but also emphasized the different volumes, which together formed the various elements of the project; he developed this aspect to its extreme in one of his most important works, the Cité de la Musique (1989), also applying these principles in the Café Beaubourg (1987), Place Beaubourg (both in Paris), for which he designed furniture and fittings. In it he made a skilful and elegant play of proportions and materials: white granite, polished and coloured concrete and prefabricated standardized elements, which add variety. The whiteness of his buildings, which gives them a feeling of purity, is sometimes punctuated with coloured detail. In 1994, Portzamparc was awarded the Pritzker Prize.

• Portzamparc, Christian de
  • France, §II, 5(iv): Architecture, after c 1914: Post-modernism and the Grands Projets
  • Grumbach, Antoine