Retrofuturism – imagining a future that never arrived

“I am just not interested in that,” he says of the latter perspective. “It’s a very easy approach, both on a conceptual and a visual level, but it’s also exploitative. Because it [the tower] is a complicated space, it’s hard to propose a simplistic answer on a visual level.”
And while ruin porn likes to pick over architectural carcasses, Minami hopes his work will help in the ongoing fight to save the building from the long-looming threat of demolition.

As Julian Rose writes in one of the book’s essays, Nakagin “has always been haunted by images…its physical existence as a building repeatedly overshadowed by its currency as the icon of an architectural avant-garde and its power as an avatar of history”. By humanising it, Minami refuses to let us separate residence and residents.
Similarly in Souvenir d’Un Futur, Laurent Kronental hopes to capture a once forward-looking architectural environment in a very human way. He’s spent the past four years wandering the Grands Ensembles housing estates in the Paris suburbs, photographing both the unusual buildings and the elderly people who call them home.

Built after the Second World War, the Tours Aillaud and the Espaces d’Abraxas, the Orgues de Flandre and the Arcades du Lac were designed to house an eclectic mix of people seeking a new life in the city. This was the architecture of change, of progress, and of opportunity, but its now faded, and Kronental found the contrast fascinating.
“For their illustrious creators they embodied modernity but their controversial urban planning now evokes a vanished social utopia,” he says. “There is an unsettling paradox of life and void.”