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.

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"Memory Wound" - 69 Innocent People Murdered

"Memory Wound" is the winning design by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg that will memorialize the 69 people killed at a Utøya youth camp by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, the most hideous massacre in Norway's modern history

As anyone who has ever run a finger along the list of endless names engraved onto that black wall in Washington, DC or stood in New York on a September 11 and watched those two columns of light beam down to where the twin towers once stood knows, the best memorials have the power to both wound and heal. That’s a lesson that Norway has clearly taken to heart. The stunning design it has selected to commemorate the 69 people that extremist Anders Behring Breivik gunned down while they were on retreat on the island of Utøya, will quite literally incise a deep wound into the landscape.

In an international competition to design the memorial that drew over 300 entries from 45 countries, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s submission won the judges’ unanimous support. It’s easy to see why. Dahlberg’s design will physically cut away the landmass on the Sørbråtan peninsula across from Utøya, leaving two cleaved halves. The names of the victims will be inscribed on a wall built into the exposed cliff, and although visitors will be able to stand across from the names, the intervening water will keep them from getting close enough touch them. “The void that is created,” wrote the jury in its decision, “evokes the sense of sudden loss combined with the long-term missing and remembrance of those who perished.”

The stone and earth removed from the site will be transferred to Oslo, to become become part of the memorial to the 8 people killed there when, during the same day’s attack, Breivik set off bombs in two government buildings. That site will also include trees and plants taken from Sørbråtan as reminders that even after so terrible an interruption, as Dahlberg wrote in his proposal, “everyday life must carry on.”

The original version of this story misspelled the Swedish artist’s name. It is Dahlberg, not Dahl.

Time