Some days ago I’ve been invited as part of the final jury for Pierre-Antoine Marraud (a former student of our atelier at ESA) diploma.
This is his final project, a hyper-detailed dystopian scenario for human devolution.
The building, considered an “Incubator”, is a rich mélange of radical utopian and dystopian references, both literary and architectural. Behind the ironic adoption of a kitsch imagery, it is easy to find allusions to Rem Koolhaas’ Exodus, Boullé’s Cenotaph, Archizoom’s No Stop City and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, while the written storyboard echoes Huxley, Debord and Ballard oeuvre. And scraping even deeper, one can find graphic references even to early generations of arcade 2D videogames.
Man is attracted by this ambiguous building in Paris and invited to undertake a downward journey through contemporary culture. Consumption, Sex, Living, Working are recontextualised as spectacularized experiences, whose final stage is a complete annihilation of human nature, or perhaps, simply a reboot.
This cynical satire is accompanied by a series of drawings representing equal platform/scenarios. Here’s a selection, including an extraordinary Section (click it to enlarge).
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