Objets immanents

Starting from three found objects – or remains of the vagaries of history – this research examined the landscape in the architectural sense of the term. The study was based on two scales: that of the territory on the one hand, which consists of towns, villages and hamlets, fields, forests and lakes and the architectural scale on the other hand, in a direct relationship with the inhabited form and the outlines of space.

The projects in this publication examine three types of conditions of habitability in large-scale infrastructure: firstly, an intermediary landscape, that is neither a city nor a rural hamlet, a substitute for modernity, producing the large flat, non-hierarchical landscape that so is typical of the early twenty-first century; secondly, an urban landscape, a slag heap of history comprising several layers, as found in many European cities as they developed over time; and finally, a rural landscape whose recent construction (almost) echoes the work of seventeenth-century painters.

The viaduct of the hover train to the north of Orléans, Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and the Vassivière dam in the Limousin: these three structures, in their guise of fake monuments that commemorate an (in)complete epic, serve as a reference for developing an approach that encompasses the notions of macro-territory and micro-buildings, and their reciprocal relationship. On a less apparent level, these projects mainly take a critical approach to a more general question, namely how man modifies his own surroundings: Man on Earth.