Power Centers

This project is an incursion into the architecture of north-American large shopping centers, also called power centers. Mass-produced in the last decades this type of malls of gigantic sizes are characterized by imposing features and based on a model that serves to accommodate motorists with their oversized parking lots surrounding a central complex. The photographs of this series are showing interiors views of these constructions made of passages bridging large atriums covered of glass structures of a style seemingly derived from another era. In relation to these images is a selection of carefully framed satellite images of those site showing the vast space they monopolize, in fact creating obvious fractures inside the dense cityscapes. This architecture is here shown as both a subject of social critique and fascination. Its representation aims to operate a detachment in relation to an apparently mundane subject and allow its re-appropriation as an object of reflexion in the scope of broader considerations about the built environment.