During lockdown, governed by the 1 km of daily walk, we were able to identify significant elements of our three places. We then collected these fragments through an isometric survey. Questionings appeared to us then appeared to us: How to make of these objects objects a real site? What creates the urbanity and what "makes landscape"?
The project settles into the three themes of the site, taking the form of three different living environments. The countryside simulates the great freedom through its natural, curved landscape, showing its varied colors and textures. Nothing seems to obstruct this landscape and yet the confinement brings a certain frustration of an outside unreachable. The notion of escape is questioned, it is necessary from now on to project our mental escape through the frame of the window as in a picture, in order to imagine ourselves outside. Everything is built in scaffolding, light materials, easily removable as a canvas that we would put in front of a landscape to capture the time of an instant.
The pavilion is a fake universe that reproduces the sensation of seeing and being seen by its neighbors. The pavilions are houses produced as a uniform mass. However, individualities are expressed behind these facades by the choice of wallpaper, the decoration, the arrangement of the room. The view that extends outwards gives a direct view of the neighborhood. These houses are therefore real observatories on the life of each person.
The device of the city comes as an emergency exit to these trampled cages pile up in a tower which meet each others without seeing them. We try to make the spectator escape from its stifling side, where each one finds himself in a box. "To exceed the borders, to break the walls", "to lunch outside"... A notion of infinity in a narrow place. The feeling of being confined is felt more strongly in the city because there is very little clear horizon, physical and visual access to a calm and soothing exterior, everything is more accentuated: noises, smells etc.
The project tries to disrupt the limits between the real and the imaginary. The subject of the confinement lends itself easily to it because no matter the place where one is confined, we all live the same situation, namely: limited displacements, restricted surfaces of life etc. The measures taken in the face of this health crisis regulate our actions, our schedules, our tasks and thus make us the protagonists of our lives. In 1857, Gustave Flaubert describes Madame Bovary at the window, because "the window, in the provinces, replaces the theaters and the walk". In this sense, Flaubert found his own entertainment in the contemplation of the other. Thus, we tried to collect personal experiences, by archiving words, sentences and quotations translating the feelings of confined individuals. In order to collect these sentences we relied on the instagram page "hidden dimension" whose publications show sentences of confined individuals associated with an image taken in confinement.
This imaginary site then becomes a theme park that reflects the idea of artifice, of pretense, arousing intrigue but also a certain utopia and even a certain fantasy. We thus wished in a frank way to treat the theme of confinement through amusement. We then treated the notion of decor, of actors through through several scales: the scale of the city the city, then the scale of the body and more of the body and more precisely of the glance. Thus, the project is lived in two different ways different ways: the actor, him, is completely immersed in this artificial universe and reproduces and reproduces daily mechanized tasks. The spectator is behind the scene and behind the scenes of the site through all the all the technical devices.
To build the fictitious site, we first tried to place the isometric elements on an orthonormal grid. Then, we tried to find the nature of each universe by recreating fragments of suburban, urban and rural fabrics. This step of recomposition of the grounds allowed us to find a point of contact between the three places: the road; and to introduce the notion of course. Thus, we continued to shape the site, gradually making the grid disappear in a visual way. The main challenge was to transgress this generic grid that domesticates the space making it superficial and disenchanted. We then tried to bring singularities, flaws to animate and give back the spirit to the place.