La ville rangée, by Armelle Caron

Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes – 2005 / 2008
ces dessins sont imprimés sur toile canevas en 3 exemplaires numérotés (120 cm de large par plan).

Armelle Caron deconstructs cities, identifies fragments, classifies blocks by size and shape. All meaning, memory, void and heritage is kept away by decontextualization. The urban assemblage of the “villes rangées” relies on analysis, order, rhythm, dimension, typology, strata.

“Urbain trop urbain“, writes that cities talk out of their desorder, and their language is lost after all research for an hidden order. Linguistics concepts are needed (Hjelmslev): if meaning evolves out of the Relation between Expression and Content (the former being the articulation and physical properties of the signifier, the latter exposing the effects of signs and of their formal organisation), people can read a “language of the city”, a living Relationship of Expression and Content, under syntax, frame, visual and architectural objects. “Ranger la ville” means keeping Content, excluding Expression: without a structure of form and substance, the Language of a city is dead.

A “Ville Rangée” is a sort of “langue sans langage”, and all attempts of reconstruction of an Expression’s plan out of Content (Armelle Caron tries to recreate a new city reassembling the wooden blocks cut from a real city) reveals utopic, if not impossible.

Read more on Urbain, trop Urbain (in French)
Via: Deconcrete

Thanks Federico. Read a review on his excellent Europan entry here.

PARIS

BERLIN

TAMARAC

NEW YORK

MONTPELLIER

LE HAVRE

ISTANBUL

PARIS PUZZLE ASSEMBLAGE