Meeting with the architect Rodolphe Parente

L’OFFICIEL: Who made you want to become an architect?
Rodolphe Parente : I almost want to say... my father. He had a construction company and all the architects came at home discussing projects. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by this dialogue between the hand and the material, between architects and places.

L’O: Tell us about your background…
rp: I was scheduled to go to engineering school or do maths, but I made a 360° turn by joining the Beaux-Arts in Dijon with prestigious speakers like Yan Pei Ming as a drawing teacher.

L’O : Weren’t you disoriented by this universe which was diametrically opposed to the one you knew?
rp : I had to reprogram myself. I spent my time in the library, I tried to learn everything about everything. I think that not having been raised in this artistic culture at the beginning, probably meant that I learned more and faster.

L'O : This allowed you to shape your own perspective since the influence came through your reading.
rp : I took a fresh look at this artistic universe that transcended me. I remember the exhibitions at the Consortium in Dijon, on the work of Barbara and Michael Leisgen, or those of Yayoi Kusama. Sublime! After the Beaux-Arts, I joined the Arts-Décoratifs in Strasbourg, then I entered the ECAL in Lausanne where I met artists like Florence Doléac of Radi Designers or Ronan Bouroullec . It's like meeting Madonna .

L’O: Tell us about your arrival at Andrée Putman…
rp: I was lucky enough to be in charge of projects very quickly, such as the renovation of the Morgans Hotel in New York. I think that with a desire to work on interior design rather than furniture. Andrée always said something that carried me, and still does today, “not daring is already losing”. When you have that in you, anything is possible. With her, I learned this mixture of the poor and the rich, and to look at materials differently. When she spoke, it was surrealism in the style of André Breton. I remember one day when we had to draw a collection for Poltrona Frau and she told us a story, that of a young girl who kissed a golden frog at the foot of a tree. That was her starting point, her inspiration for designing this collection. And so you took elements from that, you tried to understand, analyze to draw and propose lines. It was an absolutely unexpected way of working. I loved her desire to move things, her way of making a material shine, it was very interesting. I also remember this conversation, she was 82 years old, about the color of cars in Paris, this false white which, according to her, could be a very beautiful colour of lacquer for a trunk. Her eye was permanently open.

L'O: How long did you stay with him?
rp: Almost five years and, shortly before my 30th birthday, I left the studio to set up my own, in 2009. Things led me towards artistic direction. I liked being confronted with issues that were not stylistic, but performance issues, or how to bring a brand to life. I continue to work in this direction for houses like Cartier .

L’O: Who was your agency’s first client?
rp: A man I met at a private view at Andrée's. He offered to redo his apartment. At our first meeting, he arrived with four images: a cell by Le Corbusier, a blouse by Eileen Gray, a photo of Twin Peaks by David Lynch and one of a checkerboard carpet. And he told me: I'm a Buddhist so I want to evoke my relationship with spirituality in my interior.

L’O: What specifications!
rp: The most beautiful to do a project. Named Concrete, I imagined for this place a shiny red floor, a minimalist golden brass column, a symbol of spirituality, bedside tables that opened like Gray's blouse and a shower in a stainless steel box. Sophisticated, detailed and very neat, I realized a project of rare beauty and singularity because I had a trusted client.

L’O: Tell us about your notion of style…
rp: My desire is to escape this notion, I prefer to talk about contextualized projects and project culture. The place is one thing, but the important thing is to understand what my clients want: their uses, rituals and lifestyles. It is very important to play ping-pong with them to create tailor-made projects.

L'O: Without talking about style, we can talk about the sense of color and the place of contemporary art in your work.
rp: I understand color when it is structured and immersive. It provokes shapes that change the perception of space. For contemporary art, I am lucky to have clients who have beautiful collections, but I am not an Art Advisor. When my clients have one, I maintain a close dialogue to be able to set up their pieces. Otherwise, there are those who ask us to develop their hanging. You must not be snobbish about the acquisition, you have to see how an acquisition resonates in you. So we give directions on artists, galleries, etc.

L’O: Does one of your inspirations come back often, or even all the time?
rp: That of a curtain by Félix Gonzàles-Torres. I like these very simple materials but which say a lot by introducing immateriality at the same time. We also find images of the work of James Turrel and his relationship to space, color and perspective. I don't look at what my contemporaries do, it doesn't interest me. I am more interested in a Jean Paul Gaultier dress embroidered with a certain gradient, because there is something interesting to take up there. I am an interior designer, I am interested in volume, in material, in light, in wanderings, in gestures, how you open a drawer, how you close a cupboard door, what noise this door makes. That is what interests me, and what I find in the experiments of artists.

L'O: You were talking earlier about the tradition of interior designers, how do you express it through your projects?
rp: The interior decorators all had this extremely advanced relationship with craftsmanship. Even if it is almost common today to hear about artistic crafts, we always want to support them. I like spending my time in the workshops, understanding the gestures, the objects, the material, how we embroider or pleat a fabric, to transpose that into other worlds. We use this know-how when it brings something new. I am not very sensitive to these overly busy worlds where we pile on to reassure. The biggest complexity of our profession is knowing how to give up and make our clients understand it.

L’O: What are your current projects?
rp: Currently, I am working with Marion Mailaender on a gym, the famous Ken Club. And next year, we will deliver the legendary Le Provençal hotel on the Giens peninsula, for which we wondered how to keep the charm of this family hotel with its generosity and its slightly old-fashioned style. We will also deliver a hotel in Rome for the Experimental Group. For me, who has an Italian passport (my father comes from Abruzzo) and a French passport, this hotel is a gift. We also have a residence project in Pantelleria where writers, artists, designers, geologists will be invited... And we are also working on a house in the Hamptons.

L'O: Tell us about your work as a designer, some of whose pieces have just been acquired by the Mobilier National…
rp: I have in fact designed around ten pieces, armchairs and lighting, with variations. The furniture was launched through projects from the very beginning of the agency. It is a production that has its own existence. I am both an interior architect and a designer. This in-between position suits me perfectly.

L’O: Which artist left a lasting impression on you this season at Art Basel Paris?
rp: My favorites are Jesse Darling at Sultana and Osama Al Rayyan at Federico Vavassori.

L’O: Who would you like to design a house for?
rp: An artist. The most beautiful one I saw was Bob Hope's in Palm Springs.