60-Year-Old French Apartments Look Like a Utopian Dream

• AUTHOR: LAURA MALLONEE.LAURA MALLONEE

THE COLOSSAL CONCRETE buildings in Laurent Kronental’s series Souvenir d’un Futur look like something out of a futuristic sci-fi blockbuster. To some degree, they are—a few of them will appear in the upcoming Hunger Gamesmovie—but they are more than 60 years old and sit just beyond Paris.

These modernist buildings, known as grand ensembles, were France’s response to a severe post-war housing shortage. Between 1954 and 1973, the country erected public housing in the suburbs surrounding the City of Light. These towering structures, which included some six million units, embodied the prevailing idea that modernist architecture could help foster a utopian state by improving people’s lives. “They were praised as places where men could blossom away from the agitation of big cities,” Kronentalsays.

Kronenthal lives in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie, home to a grand ensemble called Les Damiers. He often passed its towers on his way to the subway, and found their hulking, Lego-like form fascinating. “The buildings appear retro-futuristic, as if they were lost between past and future,” he says.

In 2011, Kronental started photographing Les Damiers and other public housing around Paris. He’s shot a dozen grand ensembles and plans to shoot more. He works with a large format film camera and visits early in the morning, when few people are out and about. He returns each season to capture the structures in the changing light.

The images possess an eerie beauty, and you may recognize some of them. Les Espaces d’Abraxas in Noisy-le-Grand, designed by Ricardo Bofilla, is a magnificent Greek-inspired structure that is both traditional and bizarre. It was used as the Capitol in the first installment of Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Tours Aillaud in Nanterre might be the strangest; the building, designed by Emile Aillaud, features circular towers pocked like Swiss cheese and topped by pyramids.

Kronental also photographed some of the buildings’ elderly residents. They appear in and around their homes, dwarfed by ovoid archways and massive gray balconies. Although people of all ages live in the grand ensembles, the photographer sought a somewhat fantastical mood that only their oldest residents could evoke. “I wished to create the atmosphere of a parallel world mixing past and future, while consciously conveying the impression of towns that would be emptied of their residents except the elderly who would be the last survivors of a post-apocalyptical world,” he says.

In the end, the grand ensembles didn’t succeed in bringing about a modernist utopia. It wasn’t long after the first of them went up that poverty and crime began to plague the projects. France stopped commissioning them in 1973, though some were constructed into the 1980s. Many of been demolished, with even more slated to be torn down as they age. Kronental, however, thinks they are worthy of celebrating. “They amaze me. They are unique,” he says. “Of course they should be preserved.”

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/laurent-kronental-souvenir-dun-futur-french-public-housing-nanterre/#slide-6