OLIVIER ZAHM (French magazine editor): That time of reconstruction, the desire to create something new, to change, you were surrounded by artists — for example, you worked with Yves Klein. How did you meet him?
CLAUDE PARENT: I liked his work a lot. A friend of his once told him his drawings were ugly, that he expressed nothing that could attract people to his work. He said he knew a guy - me - who would do that for him, who would draw anything he wanted. So, Klein turned up, and we drew things together until he died.
—In an interview by Purple Magazine, 2013, Issue 20
Artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) and architect Claude Parent (born 1923) first worked together in 1969, on Klein's Air Architecture project; subsequent collaborations included the "Pneumatic Rocket" and the Fontaines de Varsovie project. Parent and his office produced professional architectural designs for Klein's concepts, clarifying their utopian aspirations with exquisite delicacy. Shortly after Klein's death at the age of 34, his widow, Rotraut Klein-Moquay, and his mother, Marie Raymond, asked Parent to create an architectural design for an Yves Klein Memorial, to be built on a small plot of land above Saint-Paul de Vence in southeastern France.
—The Memorial, an Architectural Project, Yves Klein / Claude Parent