Between the 1950s and 1980s, large-scale residential districts were built in and around Paris, France, to provide affordable housing for a booming population. Known as “grands ensembles,” these sprawling complexes were poorly planned and constructed, leading to their eventual abandonment as residents found other places to live.
However, there are still some senior citizens who call the housing projects home. For his project Souvenir d’un Futur, photographer Laurent Kronental documented these strangely beautiful buildings and the people who live in them.
Kronental spent four years visiting the grands ensembles, meeting with residents, hearing their stories, and photographing their aging surroundings with a 4×5 large format film camera.
“Marked by the passing of time, these massive, gray buildings, like their elder residents, bear the signs of long lives,” Kronental writes. “And yet, in these wrinkled faces and cracked walls, in the energy of the bodies and of the facades, emerges the pride and pulse that we thought had disappeared.”
“These ‘monuments’, as living memories of their time, hold a fragile force: that of a younger generation that did not see itself age.”
You can find more of Kronental’s work over on his website.
(via Laurent Kronental via Bored Panda)
Image credits: Photographs by Laurent Kronental and used with permission
from PetaPixel http://petapixel.com/2016/03/02/eerily-beautiful-photos-crumbling-utopian-housing-projects-paris/
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