Zachary Gaudrillot-Roy - Surreal Landscapes

In any design, the street-facing façade, the structural feature that first meets the eye, has the largest impact. However, in a new series of photos by French artist Zachary Gaudrillot-Roy, the façade is the only part of the building that matters, because it's the only part that exists. Façades features urban landscapes wherein billboard-like façades are completely detached from any structure—street scenes that are at once arresting and confounding.

Gaudrillot-Roy has a fascination with the immediate impression created by a building's façade, how the veneer seems to shape our understanding of the built environment and those hidden behind the outer walls.

"The façade is the first thing we see, it’s the surface of a building," the artist explains. "It can be impressive, superficial or safe. Just like during a wandering through a foreign city, I walk through the streets with these questions: what will happen if we stick to that first vision? If the daily life of 'The Other' was only a scenery? This series thus offers a vision of an unknown world that would only be a picture, without intimate space, with looks as the only refuge."

Using photo-manipulation software, Gaudrillot-Roy transports the façades of nameless buildings onto the streets of similarly anonymous locations. These ephemeral, substance-less structures echo our own anxieties about the endurance of the built environment; like cardboard cut-outs, there's less here than what meets the eye.

Mais fotos em Architizer