Claude Parent and André Bloc’s work renovated by the Avicenne Foundation
Inaugurated in November 2024, the renovation of the Fondation Avicenne – formerly the ‘Maison de l’Iran’ – on the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris [the International University Campus of Paris. Ed.], by French architects Béguin and Macchini, has shed new light on this project, located on the edge of the ring road surrounding Paris. A major legacy of Claude Parent and André Bloc. Back from the visit.
Anastasia de Villepin
André Bloc, Claude Parent were all AA needed to visit the Avicenne Foundation at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, formerly known as the ‘House of Iran’ and restored by the French agency Béguin et Macchini, inaugurated in November 2024. It has taken 17 years to bring this iconic Bloc-Parent duo project. Closed in 2007, the dilapidated premises had been two years earlier handed off to architects Béguin and Macchini, who had won the competition in 2005, by a jury that included Claude Parent himself.
What followed could have been dramatic if it weren’t so commonplace: the lack of financial resources to tackle the giant metal and glass building, which was also contaminated with asbestos, slowed down the restoration work. It wasn’t until the RIVP, the French government – via the ‘plan de relance’ (or ‘recovery plan’) movement, the DRAC Île-de-France and the French Ministry of Housing – and the European Union joined forces to finance the project that the machine started turning again.
And what a machine it is. Back in 1957, when the Iranian architects Moshen Foroughi and Heydar Ghiai were appointed, their project was not very popular – too much floor space, among other things. Invited by the two architects, André Bloc, a French figure renowned worldwide for his work and his magazine, came to the rescue of the project, accompanied by Claude Parent. The four project managers came up with a final design in 1961, and the building was inaugurated in October 1969.
Excerpts from L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui No.141, 1969. Click to scroll.
On the edge of the Boulevard Périphérique, Paris ring-road which, coincidentally, is being built at the same time, the Maison de l’Iran can only accommodate the constraints of its territory – and the administrative issues that govern it. For Parent, the eloquence of the building guarantees its survival. ‘In distant vision, it required a simple, immediate grip, because of the high speed of vehicles on the roads, and therefore a short perception time. It is a rare example, in Paris, of the reality of geometral vision’, he wrote in January 1969 in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (No.141).
He continues: ‘Steel was chosen for the strength of its design. On two to three storeys of quarry, the construction of a 35 m high vertical, in which 100 dorm rooms had to be accommodated (within the regulatory alignments), militated in favour of a large framework-support touching the ground at few points’. Three porticos, linked by horizontal rails projecting into consoles, support two residential volumes, separated by a recessed floor housing the Shahbanou of Iran, Farah Diba, wife of the Shah of Iran at the time, who commissioned the project*.
‘This steel structure meant that there was actually very little concrete. At the time, the project, which was led by CFEM [Compagnie Française d’Entreprises Métalliques, the former Eiffel workshops. Ed.] among others, required the parts to be welded on site. These techniques are similar to those used in shipyards,’ points out Gilles Béguin, partner in the Béguin et Macchini agency behind the renovation, who himself once worked for Parent. ‘What’s more, the solid metal has been encased in welded sheet metal caissons, in a quasi-sculptural treatment that André Bloc would not have disliked’. Respecting the sculptor’s delicacy, the architects from Béguin et Macchini, after extensive asbestos removal, repainted the metal structures in quartz black.
For the architects, at the bedside of steel, the task was to consolidate this iconic nine-storey structure, while redesigning the interior rooms. Gone were the communal sanitary facilities; from now on, all 111 accommodation units will be equipped with a kitchen and a shower room, installed ‘in a wiggle’ in the narrowness of the studio, a winking oblique. Gone, too, is the imperial suite, now a shared flat for five residents. A few details of the interior design, by the French designer Jean Royère at the time, have been preserved, such as the wooden balustrades, which were removed, renovated and then replaced to surround a sunken lounge accessible by a few steps.
Perhaps the beauty of the project lies in this imperial interstice that has become a communal home, open to visiting students: it is on this very terrace that you can taste the power of these suspended spaces, held in place by three metal claws. And since the rooms all have east-facing loggias, and since it’s not so much a question of seeing as of being seen, for the Maison de Parent the three blind façades – clad in white and grey Eternit – are quickly forgiven. ‘It is in the assertion of the line of this main framework that the aesthetic aspect of the project lies. Expressed and rejected outside the habitable volumes, this framework marks out the space’, defended Parent in AA.
*Financed by the Iranian state, the house became a hotbed of opposition to the regime, then closed and abandoned. It was taken over by the Cité internationale universitaire in 1972, which renamed it Avicenne, after a 10th-century Persian physician and scholar.
