ANTHROPISED LANDSCAPES
Future Rust, Future Dust (2016 - )Modern Nasca (2021)
Frontière (In)visible (2023 - )
Le Canal des Possibles (2023 - 203X)
ARISO (2023 - )
STANDARDISED LANDSCAPES
Age of Kitsch (2019 - 2022)A l’orée des champs (2020 - 2024)
A volonté (2021 - )
Heterotopia (2021)
Same Same But Different (2023 - )
HORS-SERIES
Graphic Architecture (2012 - 2016)Varosha (2022)
PRINTS
ABOUT
A l’orée des champs
2020 - 2024
Urban sprawl is not a new phenomenon into the French landscape and particularly
in the Paris region, but it is constantly pushing the residential areas far
away from the city and the employment areas. Since the 1970s it has taken the
form of housing estates which have become the symbol of the peri-urban area,
between town and countryside, a territory with blurred and fluid boundaries.
Today, new suburban areas under Parisian influence are developing further and
further away from the capital (sometimes more than 100 km away), sometimes even
beyond the borders of the Île-de-France region, close to the major transport
routes (motorways, national roads, Transilien rail network) that structure
home-to-work trips.
The housing estate model is often criticized in a period when the environment
and ecology matters are increasingly at the centre of social debate: strong
automobile dependency for daily trips, artificialization of the soils, monopolisation
of agricultural land, disruption of certain ecosystems, normalization of
landscapes (concept de "ugly France")... But above all, it is a means
of escaping the frenzy and the noise of big cities, and takes its place in the
dream of "low-cost" home ownership in a greener setting to watch
one's family grow up.
With these archetypes in mind, what does life really look like in these new
territories of the 21st century?
Avoiding stigmatisation of these territories and those who live there, this
project aims to be a photograph of reality, without concession. Of all the
peri-urban areas crossed, there are recurrences. Here and there we see urban
stigmas specific to these places: houses for sale, still under construction and
already abandoned, unfinished infrastructures without really knowing when, and
if, they will be finished one day. An atmosphere of perpetual construction
without end is emanating from it. Escaping from the vertical promiscuity of the
Parisian suburbs, the inhabitants of these areas face a promiscuity of a new
order, horizontal this time: houses a few centimeters apart, gardens
overlooking each other. You can see everything, you know everything that's
going on in your neighbor’s house.
But the main recurrence is indeed that of architectural redundancy, of a house
that strangely resembles the neighbor’s, and those from the other suburban
areas of the region. Everywhere and yet nowhere, repetitive and juxtaposed.