As if the house had been swept away by a tornado, blown through by a violent wind that had swollen its interior volume, swept away in a gust, and knocked over with a single stroke of the excavator. All that remains is its outline and traces of its partitions.
A rickety, ramshackle hovel, leaning on the nearby buildings like an old woman on her cane.
Its outline testifies to its poverty, one that clutches and clings to the neighbouring walls. Its talons have sunk too deeply into the material to disappear – unless everything were razed to the ground.
It would take a tabula rasa to erase the indigence.
A lunar landscape of mud, gravel, and puddles.
The terrain is as uncertain as a tablecloth onto which volumes of all sizes have been thrown at random. Facing left, facing right, without a front or a back.
A brand-new cube, still wrapped in its protective covering.
The façade faithfully reproduces the pattern that had been drawn up in just a few clicks years earlier. I don’t even feel like using the correct terms – wall face, trumeau, opening – instead just Duplicate, align, distribute. Freeze layer.
The old Armagnac postal sorting centre will soon be sliced up, chopped into little bits, and scrubbed clean with bleach. Sitting off axis, its bulk is intimidating. “We would really like to keep you, just not so big. We need you to try a little harder”. The only recognisable elements will be the recessed entrance and the grooved concrete, a ghostly remainder.
A brand-new streetlamp has sprung up between the two temporary electric poles which are the lifelines to the worksite. It won’t work today. And it won’t work tomorrow either, once the roadworks are completed and the power is turned on.
Stranded in the foreground is the wreck of a Beemer. Is it an illegal speedster or a stolen car, set on fire to hide all traces? Or was it burned in a fit of rage? Who knows…
Select objects to explode and press Enter.
A forest of buildings grows out of the ground like seeds in the spring, eager for sunlight, full of the unstoppable energy within them as they push out of their long, dark gestation. Cranes turn in the sky as stories pile up on top of one another like a film in fast-forward mode. The concrete has barely dried in its formwork when the exterior joinery is installed, the tiles laid, and the kitchens configured. There’s no time, there’s just no time. The infamous late penalties for each day of delay past the scheduled completion date. Time once stretched out so easily during the study phase, the many meetings to update the programme, explore variations, and adjust the sales plan, but here, it has vanished. Projects often move ahead in fits and starts, sometimes slowed down by endless dithering and at others, sped up recklessly, with a total disregard for everyone’s intellectual efforts and the execution of the work.
Tomorrow, the building complex, shining like a brand-new coin, will be delivered, photographed, inaugurated, and published on social media. Institutional websites will be updated. Keys will be given to the inhabitants, companies will lift their final reservations, the final accounts will be drawn up, and the project managers will start the preliminary design phase for another urban development zone.
When does a development become a neighbourhood? When the person operating an “active plinth” superette chats with his clients? When the saplings along the landscaped path grow into a full canopy? When the inhabitants learn their neighbours’ names and their kids make plans to meet at the playground? What is the time of a city?