Futuroscope is a French amusement park located in my hometown, Poitiers, state of Poitou-Charentes. In the mid 80’s, the state was in an economic turmoil with a slowly decaying farming oriented economy. Understanding that it was mandatory to make a drastic shift in the economic development of the area, local state decided to develop in Poitiers a vast business park and an amusement park, both oriented towards the emerging new technologies economy. To do so and in the words of local state president at the time, each built architecture should convey a technologic and modern message, representative of the world of tomorrow.
To deliver the wanted futuristic vision, architect Denis Laming was chosen to draw and supervise the construction of the park. In the following series are presented the iconics buildings of the park, built during the late 80’s and 90’s.
They are stripped out their actual context, distracting objects and people have been removed in order to focus only on the architecture. The aim of this series is to question if the 90’s neo-futuristic architecture drawn by Denis Laming is still relevant, 30 years later, as an embodiment of the future.
