Portzamparc, Christian de (1944-…), is a French architect known for his ambitious urban projects in France. Perhaps his most famous project is the Cité de la Musique (City of Music), a group of buildings in Paris. The first part of the project, completed in 1990, is a teaching facility for the National Conservatory of Music and Dance. The second part, completed in 1995, includes public spaces for concerts. The project is a small city, with streets, restaurants, shops, and houses in addition to the public structures. For Portzamparc, even the empty spaces between buildings should be enlivened. Exterior white walls and pools of water give the project a lyrical elegance. In 1994, Portzamparc was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious international award in architecture (see Pritzker Architecture Prize).
Portzamparc’s Paris Opera Dance School (completed in 1987) in Nanterre is a huge, transparent hall with residential wings connected to the surrounding area by a park. Individual dance studios surround a circular central staircase.
Portzamparc’s other major projects in Paris include the Erik Satie Conservatory of Music and Elderly Housing (1983), the Hautes-Formes housing project (1979), the Café Beaubourg (1987), the Ungaro Boutique retail store (1988), and the unconventionally shaped Granite Tower (2008) for the Société General. He also designed the Crédit Lyonnais Tower (1996) in Lille, which spans the railroad station. No face of the building is parallel to another, creating a sense of continual rotation. His designs outside France include an apartment building complex (1991) in Fukuoka, Japan; the LVMH Tower (1999) in New York City; the City of Music (2007) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and One57 (2013), a residential tower in New York City.
Christian Urvoy de Portzamparc was born on May 5, 1944, in Casablanca, Morocco, where his father was an officer in the French army. Portzamparc studied at the School of Fine Arts from 1962 to 1969. He opened his first architecture office in 1970 and continued his studies, working with French architect Antoine Grumbach on ideas of public space. Portzamparc’s first project, completed in 1979, was a water tower in Marne-la-Vallée based on the Biblical Tower of Babel as painted by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1563. Portzamparc designed the tower with an outer surface resembling a fine mesh trellis and covered it with climbing plants.
