In 1966 the architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio published nine issues of their magazine “Architecture Principe” in Paris. Their manifestoes on “The Function of the Oblique” reconsidered the idea of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and the oblique axis, and were meant to destabilize both contemporary modern and postmodern perceptions of space. Starting from the spatial experiences of a human body moving on an inclined plane, Parent and Virilio conceived various experimental installations, among them the French Pavilion in the 1970 Venice Architecture Biennial and Parents own house in Neuilly-sur-Seine. One of their last common projects was a self-experiment in inhabiting the oblique, called the “Instabilisateur Pendulaire“(Pendular Destabilizer). Both Parent and Virilio were planning to inhabit a capsular space hung up in an angle on the campus of the University of Nanterre, monitored by sociologists and medical scientists. Due to the beginning of the student uprisings in Nanterre in 1968, this experiment was never realized.
