Souvenir d´un Futur
Laurent Kronental
Paris, France
In a place that lives on memories, someone manages to show us what still inhabits in its walls.

With an analogic camera as his only tool, the photographer Laurent Kronental digs us into de center of some of the majestic urban developments built in the suburbs of Paris in the middle of the 19th century.  Souvenirs d´un Futur documents the life of senior citizens still living in those dwellings. Nowadays, the French society rejects these uninhabited urban landscapes because of its origins: address the housing crisis and suffocate the inflow of foreign migrants between de 50s and the 80s.The grandious efforts made to enhance the French values led into gigantic volumes closer to the modernist utopia than to a more appropriate human scale.

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Les Tours Aillaud, Emile Aillaud © Laurent Kronental
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Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental
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Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental

A great amount of architects showed interest for these projects. Some of the featured designs are Les Tours Aillaud, by Emile Aillaud, Les Damiers, in west Paris, and La Cité du Parc, by Jean Renaudie and Reneé Gailhoustet amongst others. All of them share a common aspect, the signs of long lives both in its façades and dwellers.

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© Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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Puteaux-La Défense© Laurent Kronental
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Les Tours Aillaud, Emile Aillaud © Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental

Through this series, Laurent Kronental proves the poetry of aging environments slowly vanishing, and with them, the memory of modernist utopia

Image of 25 09 in Souvenir d´un Futur - Cosentino
Les Orgues de Flandre, Martin van Trek © Laurent Kronental
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Arènes de Picasso, Manuel Núñez Yanowsky © Laurent Kronental
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Les Tours Aillaud, Emile Aillaud © Laurent Kronental
Image of 33 12 in Souvenir d´un Futur - Cosentino
Cité Maurice-Thorez, Henri&Robert Chevallier; Cité du Parc, Jean Renaudie&Renée Gailhoustet © Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental
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Le Viaduc et les Arcades du Lac, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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© Laurent Kronental
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Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental
Image of 3 20 in Souvenir d´un Futur - Cosentino
Les Damiers, Jacques Binoux © Laurent Kronental
Image of 1 21 scaled in Souvenir d´un Futur - Cosentino
Le Viaduc et les Arcades du Lac, Ricardo Bofill © Laurent Kronental

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