MOTIF, 2009
series of vector drawings
prints on plotter 120x60cm
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This series of drawings was created from photographs taken from inside an Haussmann building during its restructuration. To be revised the building was emptied, only the facades were kept thanks to a metal armature and a wooden canvas.
The façadism, terminology employed by José Aguiar to designate this type of restructuration, is defined as the antithesis of patrimonial conservation. This practice, a compromise meaning to leave the field open to real estate, which usually manifest low consideration to the built, the structural principles and the historical circumstances which gave birth to the construction, has for consequence the loss of information and, through the celebration of bygone sets, the reactivation of signs inherited from old political orders.
Obeying this logic of elective conservation, as the building reduced to a simple aesthetic motif, the photographs have been emptied to only leave apparent few lines: the ones defining the skyline (the ones distinguishing the construction and its environment). Taking the architectural representation codes, these drawings, sort of reversed survey drawing, reminds symbolically then the restructuring power of architecture and the mutual determinism which links a shape and the society which produced it.
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Photos:
1-3. extracts from the series
