ROYAL INSTITUTE OF BRITISH ARCHITECTS MAY 2, 2002

Ce jour-là, Henri Ciriani fut nommé "Fellow" de l'Institut Britannique d'Architectes. Ci dessous le discours de l'architecte Richard Parnaby.

HENRI CIRIANI
Henri Ciriani is a leading figure of late twentieth century architecture in France. His architecture is rooted in the work of le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, which he studied during an architectural education in his home town
of Lima, Peru.

Henri worked for the government design studio and, still in his twenties, led a team of designers in executing many of the Modern Movement's ideas and building thousands of public sector homes and educational facilities. His concerns with public space and the social quality of architecture have informed all his work.

In 1965 he settled in France and worked with the Gomis studio. He became a French citizen in 1976, the year he set up his private practice in Paris. His key projects include housing at Noisy-le-Grand, Marne la Vallée (1975-80), Cour d'Angle apartments, St Denis, Paris (1978-82), child care centres at Saint Denis & Torcy (1983/1989), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne (1992), the Musée de l'Arles Antique (1995), Santillana beach house in Lima (1999), Noorderpoortcollege, Groningen (2000) and most recently the INRIA congress (conference?) and  documentation centre in Rocquencourt (2001).

Henri is a popular teacher at the School of Architecture at Paris-Belleville, where he has taught since 1977 leading the Uno group. He has received the Silver Medal from the Colegio de Arquitectos in Peru and Grand Prix National d'Architecure in France. He accepted the latter honour as a representative of the generation of architects who brought new meaning to architecture in France after 1968.

Richard Meier met Ciriani while working in Paris in 1978 and he has written, 'I visited a great many completed works that impressed me with their inventiveness, their concern for detail, and their intellectual rigour expressed in a variety of attitudes. This was a memorable moment for architecture: it was the beginning of an era in France that allowed architects and architecture to speak out; it was a time during which even very young architects had the opportunity to do creative research on a scale, up to then, reserved for the established. Among the 'young' architects I had the pleasure of getting to know well was Henri Ciriani. He was young, he is young, and his projects are forever young.'

Richard Parnaby