Laurent Kronental
Photographic perspectives
Versailles, 1965
Claude Parent architect
Built for the industrialist Gaston Drusch and his family on the edge of the Versailles forest, the Drusch House marks a decisive moment in Claude Parent’s work. In it, the architect asserted the graphic power of reinforced concrete and introduced the notion of momentum and imbalance on the scale of a project for a detached house.
The house comprises two main buildings: a narrow wing housing the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and garage, and an impressive hollow parallelepiped tilted at one of its edges. This seemingly unstable volume houses the two-storey living room, profoundly questioning the spatial perception of living spaces.
Laurent Kronental
Laurent Kronental was born in 1987. He lives and works in Paris. A self-taught photographer, he discovered photography in China during a stay of several months in Beijing. He was seduced by the big cities and the variety of their architecture, their inhabitants, the way they tame space and their personal stories. From 2011 to 2015, he produced his first artistic series, ‘Souvenir d’un Futur’, about elderly people living in large housing estates in the Paris region. His work raises questions about the condition of older people in these areas, and highlights a generation that is sometimes neglected. It offers a different perspective on these often underestimated suburbs, whose walls seem to be slowly ageing, taking with them the memory of a modernist utopia.
