Souvenir d'un Futur

The photographs – found in a photo-essay at Dezeen – contrast the grand scale of the projects, such as Les Arcades du Lac and Les Espaces d'Abraxas, with the elder residents who have aged there, and who the Kronental refers to as "the memory of the locus." Although not focused squarely on Bofill's projects – what the Catalan architect referred to as "whole towns created from scratch in order to ease the congestion in [central Paris] and promote orderly growth while avoiding as far as possible the creation of mere suburbs" – Souvenir d'un Futur is most striking when presenting his postmodern designs all these decades after completion. Appearing at the scale of the city, the projects appear empty, accentuated by the sole figures anchoring each photograph. Or as the artist describes it on his website, the photos "reveal the poetry of aging environments slowly vanishing, and with them the memory of modernist utopia."

Visit Laurent Kronental's website to see more photographs in the ongoing Souvenir d'un Futur series.