'Souvenir d’un Futur' photo essay captures Paris’ Brutalist utopia

Souvenir d’un Futur photo essay by Laurent Kronental – Jacques, 82, Le Viaduc et les Arcades du Lac, Montigny-le-Bretonneux, 2015.

Architecture. Laurent Kronental‘s touching photo essay Souvenir du Futur captures the lives of elderly residents in the expansive housing developments, known as Grands Ensembles, in metropolitan Paris. An intimate journey narrating forgotten and often neglected “wrinkled faces and cracked walls,” Kronental told Archipanic.

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Joseph, 88, Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014.

The photo essay is the culmination of four years of exploration and human interaction with the depicted individuals and their overlooked neighbourhoods. The Grands Ensembles were built from the 1950s to the 1980s in response to the housing crisis, urban migration, and the influx of foreign migrants, while also meeting modern comforts and lifestyles.

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Josette, 90, Vision 80, Esplanade de La Défense, 2013.

These expansive estates became an architectural exercise for a modernist utopia. However, in contemporary society, they frequently face negative media portrayals and are marginalised by public opinion. Fascinated by the ambition of their outdated modernistic designs, Laurent Kronental felt compelled by the living conditions of the “urban veterans” who have aged there, and who, he feels, are the embodiment of the locus.

Joseph, 88, Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014.

“I need to examine their living conditions and shed light on a sometimes-neglected generation. Exposing these unsung and underestimated suburban areas is a means to reveal the poetry of ageing environments slowly vanishing, and with them, the memory of modernist utopia,” Laurent Kronental told Archipanic.

Les Orgues de Flandre, 19e arrondissement Paris, 2014.

The photographs feature a melancholic, yet brave disenchantment. “The majestic mass of the futuristic vessels seems to drift across an ocean of concrete. But the presence of old people, which might seem unexpected in such settings, paradoxically hints at a possible hope, as if past illusions were not all dead yet.”

Lucien, 84, Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, 2014.

Souvenir d’un Futur is the culmination of four years of visits and exchanges. Kronental sought to encapsulate the essence of a parallel world, highlighting a bygone idea of the future.

“I wanted to convey the impression of towns that would be emptied of their residents. In this magnificent and ghostly world, the structures of our cities would be titanic, gobble the human, the product of our fears and hopes for an organisation of the city.”

Denise, 81, Cité Spinoza, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2015.

Marked by the passing of time, these massive, grey buildings, like their elder residents, bear the signs of long lives. “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,” adds Kronental.

Le Pavé Neuf, Noisy-le-Grand, 2015.

The peaceful faces and the bareness of the spaces convey a mix of resignation and expectation, scepticism and confidence, dissatisfaction and plenitude; a world of contrasts, deep layers of life, spontaneity. “These monuments, as living memories of their time, hold a fragile force: that of a younger generation that did not see itself age.”

Paulette, 83, Les Damiers, Courbevoie, 2015.

Self-taught photographer Laurent Kronental first encountered photography during a several-month stay in Beijing, China. He became fascinated by the vast metropolises, their diverse architectures, the people who inhabit them, and how they navigate their environments alongside their individual stories.