This is the main graphic of my entry for the architecture competition - 120 Hours. I spent around 12 hours on the image, and this is only a photoshop work, no modeliation. There were around 740 entries for this competition. Unfortunately, my project didn't win any prize, but the conception process was tough, due to the limited time we had to di the project. 5 Days, 120 hours.

 

There is also the complete text that explain the idea of the project.

 

It emerges from Pyramiden an even disturbing and poetic strength, which
depends less on its architecture than its historical background and especially
the fact that it is abandoned.
Because it is the history that gives all its power and its attraction to the place,
is this not the history which should then dominate beyond the architecture
itself?
In the same way as cameras change indubitably what they are filming by
their simple presence, the preservation of the heritage alters the essence of
what makes heritage, since we invest the past and act above.
The term “alter” isn’t pejorative and don’t ask for position on the good merits
or otherwise of this change. Architecture does not have the goal to shelter
the same populations and the same ambitions throughout its entire life. But
from that moment, we can’t speak anymore about preservation.

If pyramiden needs to be preserve from something, it should be from ourselves and our
looks. let’s close in on the city, a kind of time-capsule that might never be open. The history
of pyramiden will be engraved instead of its architecture.
So cut of the reality and the natural elements, how to determine the state in which is the
locked building? The imagination , mystery and uncertainty relative to the content
, aren’t they not therefore more powerful and suggestive as the content itself ? And
what if what we preserve were no longer accessible to ourselves? Preservation is also
often a very controlled process, leading to a finite and static shape. Here, the shape move
according to the
atmosphere and its states. Every envelope produces a light which will be visible only if
the weather situation authorize it.
Precisely, the two main components of the project, completely escape from any human
control, that’s the point.

 

In this vision, no particular program takes possession of the city, the futur
generations will decide on what Pyramiden has to become. It will be a
sanctuary if they want to, it will host an international research program, or
it might even become the new fashionable polar sea resort. But the city will
remain untouched, as its history. This project interrogates the necessity for
our contemporary society to sacralize the past at the point that architectural
preservation is transforming our heritage into an object of worship,
emptied from its initial substance.
No visual tourism here, as insipid as empty and ephemeral it is. Only
remains in the minds of eventual visitors, the trace of a thick mystery,
certainly more deeply rooted in their memory than a photo at the bottom
of a folder lost on the desktop of their computer.
2032