Back in 1963, French cultural theorist Paul Virilio called Parisian architect Claude Parent’s attention to a vertiginous spatial experience he had encountered in a World War II German bunker that had surfed down an embankment onto a beach in France. What had been a right-angled, battle-ready structure was now oblique, the walls, ceilings, and floors slanted.

The tilt produced a thrilling effect on the body, suddenly alert to every step in an angled, topsy-turvy world. Partners in the firm Architecture Principe, the two based their 1966 pamphlet, “The Function of the Oblique,” on this discovery, publishing a manifesto that coincided with Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” Theirs however offered complexity and contradiction of a different sort, based on physical experience rather than language, with an influence that arguably outlasted the book that yielded Post-Modernism.