Architecture & Habitat: The Oblique Plan, a return to physical interaction with the environement

Oblique Architecture, a style of architectural design which Virilio and Claude Parent pioneered in order "to work with gravity, with heaviness, the way a sailboat works with the wind". An early, but often unconsidered part of Virilio's practice, Oblique Architecture creates a situation in which "Every dimension, every direction of space becomes a modification of the body". This conception of the built environment, which resonates so strongly "posthumanist" discourses, seeks to engage the body with the environment at every turn. But taken in the context Virilio's larger concerns with "the contraction of distances" and the loss of the human body, the project of creating environments which readily call people to interact with them in unique ways brings about a different type of assemblage than that of the cyborg body. His description of the artist Stelarc's body modifications relates them to Mengele's dream of biology as the "art of creating monsters", and as an offense to human ecology in the sense that this post- or trans-human body pays no respect to proportionality, and in fact tries to change proportion by enhancing speed, stamina, and size-the posthuman is an attempt to escape the confines of the earth. In this light, Virilio's architecture (and by extension, many other parts of the human milieu) which calls the subject into an assemblage, does so in a way to return human-scale to a world that is quickly attempting to render it obsolete. By interacting with an environment, not to surmount it, but to live in it, the function of the oblique seeks to undo the disregard for freedom that is the product of regulation.
Taken from a critic of Crepuscular Dawn, Paul Virilio

from Architectures de cartes postales

‘the last element to be revealed in architecture will be the floor’. That is the key. Architecture has always been about the wall, the column, the roof… The thing that is overlooked is the floor… Architecture in this sense becomes choreographic. Its value comes only from the fact that it engages the body in the same way that the great staircases of Palladio engage the body. Somehow that is architecture.
…it was necessary to discard the notion of vertical enclosure, whose walls are made inaccessible by gravity, and to define habitable space by means of wholly accessible inclined planes, thereby increasing the usable surface areas.
…In contrast to partitions or vertical walls, which provoke an opposition between in front and behind, a combination of oblique and horizontal planes would result only in above and below, surface and soffit.
By setting the structure on an incline, and making every part of the built surface (except for the underside) habitable and accessible, the range of truly habitable spaces would be considerably increased.

The Function of the Oblique, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio