"The Unification of the World" "The Industrial Era" "Changing Landscape" "Turn your back on the main road." "This countryside has not changed in 200 years." "It's an industrial landscape." "The windmill is a strictly functional machine, designed to make the most of the strength of the wind." "This is what it represented to the farmers who brought the wheat to mill." "Try to look at it for a moment through their eyes and put aside all the poetic glamour of the invented tradition." "Shed the pastoral, even fantastic aspect, of our childhood fables." "Another landscape, another machine." "The kind of fascination it evokes, the dreams it creates, the methodical beauty it possesses, even its own poetry, is so different from that of the windmill made of canvas and wood." "Monstrous." "Inhuman, yet at the same time human, since it is made by man and, in a way, in his image." "It raises interest, concern and reassurance at the same time." "It possesses a charm, a personality." "It exists, in a way, like a zoological species." "It has amalgamated with its background and nature has adopted it." "It is in this tidy beauty of the industrial landscape, as it has been created between the middle of the 19th century and today, that we wish to make a brief excursion." "This is a difficult beauty." "Difficult to uncover, to let in." "It is a paradox to look for beauty in a world on which we have deliberately turned our backs." "A world dedicated to chaos, to the undefined, to perpetual change, to the uncompleted." "A world which carries the mark, unlike the rural or urban landscape, not of the joy of creativity of man but of his sweat and sorrow." "It evokes more the glory of what no longer is, than the seduction of what will be." "It's not a question of defending the indefensible." "Ugliness, undeniably, is part of the heritage handed down by the 19th century which we have, it must be said, made profitable." "It is true that our times have brought cleanliness." "But the inventor of hygiene has also introduced filth, leprosy and misery of which our forbearers had no idea." "It is quite strange that nature reveals her feelings to us just as systematic destruction of the landscape is beginning." "There is no longer a hectare of land in France on which the civilisation of machinery has not stamped infinite ramifications." "Every day in the countryside, the roads open enormous wounds through which a virus infiltrates to which we have no antidote." "Towns were the jewels of the provinces." "They made admirable backdrops in the landscape." "Their outskirts - which gave them their glory - have become today their shame." "Long gone is the happy juxtaposition of urban architecture and rural layout." "The landscapes so dear to many painters from Bruegel to Corot." "We are keen on archaeology - we founded museums and we restore monuments - but we are deprived of the pleasure of photographing the forms and the original beauty of these towers, church towers, belfries because so tight is the network of wires, pylons," "and antennas which imprison them in their webs." "Let's leave these graceless landscapes." "The sadness they exude is too paltry to feed our poetic daydreaming." "The poetry of our times... it is not in the fields and grasslands that 20th century man might hope to find it but in the smoke of the old factories' chimneys, in the heart of this industrial zone, which, for over 100 years," "has established itself at the feet of the towns, surrounding them, shutting them in, suffocating them while allowing them to live and grow." "It is no longer from the heights of Père Lachaise that we can admire, like Rastignac, the sight of prestigious Paris but by stepping back to the hills of Argenteuil." "Let's go east towards La Plaine Saint-Denis, one of the most industrial areas in the region." "It is a happy surprise to see that chaos is not the rule." "Here, the hand of man, together with chance, makes for a rigid layout." "The lines assert themselves - vertical, horizontal, curved or oblique - create contrasts, relations, rhythms, rhymes and parallelism." "We're now in the coal field of the Pas-de-Calais, near Béthune." "An ancient habit has sealed the reconciliation of nature and human activity." "An osmosis has taken place, each one borrowing characteristics of the other." "The factories, aged by the years and by fog and coal dust are part of the landscape." "While this one - having lost its usual serenity - seems to aid the intense labour of man." "As in volcanic areas, the earth works." "It turns its own hand to great work." "It doesn't symbolise that which is static but the perpetual changes that have never ceased to be since the beginning." "These slag heaps which dot the horizon are brothers of volcanoes, emerging, like them, from the belly of the earth." "Obeying the same laws of formation, they have retained their proportions, structure, profiles, and their bitter sterility." "They give the landscape the look it had before the erosions, sedimentations and floods." "All poetry is metaphor." "We evoke volcanoes but this chimney also reminds us of a donjon." "It has the same air, formidable and familiar and the same allure, as a protector and a guardian." "And in front of it, on a calm morning, as in the "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry", the peasant continues the gesture of the sower." "Sometimes, not much is needed to find ourselves in fantasy." "Under the setting sun, this landscape on the outskirts of Paris, the building site of a future ring road, transforms in a few minutes into El Dorado." "The cement mixers are soaring towers, the flour-mills - enchanted palaces." "A magic spell, which we know, like the sun, how to perform every now and then." "We project our own shadows, turning our backs to reality and get stuck in the caves of our imagination." "We had so many objects we were trying to name endowed with a more mysterious power." "They were gifted - without us knowing - with poetic dignity." "This barge is surely poetic." "It has its coat of arms, its golden legend, and from it could emerge, like wandering sailing boats, a ghostly world." "The train, on the contrary, is no longer a terrifying dragon." "Looking at it go past was the Sunday luxury of our grandfathers." "This innocent old-fashioned vice, has remained the best game for kids." "The automobile, the tank or the rocket still haven't managed to replace it." "It was the first, in time and nobility, modern means of transport which, from Phileas Fog's railway to Tintin's airplane, lived in the books and albums of our youth next to Cinderella's coach and the seven-league boots." "A port landscape." "Here, there's no need for a Merlin or for the prism of our imagination to transform into gold the lead of dull reality." "The sea is a great magician." "It transforms everything it touches, no one escapes." "It knows how to impose its tyranny even on the most utilitarian object." "It dictates its stature, its size, its proportions, its charm." "It gives it a transparency, a fineness of lace, an intangibility almost." "Under the marine sky, steel loses some of its aggression." "It became noble when the rural world was pushing it away, proclaiming its indignity." "The medieval towers seen in the distance no longer suffer from the proximity of the cranes." "Let's return to the countryside that we were criticising earlier." "It too, at times, is abundant with mirages." "This chateau whose silhouette is soaring in the horizon, is only a recently built silo." "But here the sun, far from transforming it, accentuates its modernism." "As for the pylons, which disturb the peace of the field, their form, deprived of finesse and majesty, confirms our previous anathema." "The beauty of this modern world is not immediately obvious." "It requires an effort, a training, an asceticism." "But we no longer need to be the pioneers." "Others have paved the way from the very beginning." "Many are painters who, from the Impressionists to the Fauvists, have taken their motifs from the industrial landscape." "Jongkind." "Van Gogh." "Monet." "Pissarro." "Signac." "Marquet." "Vlaminck." "Le Douanier Rousseau." "La Fresnaye." "More recent paintings - this one, for example, by Léger," "Villon," "Delaunay," "Mondrian," "Klee," "Kandinsky," "Vieira da Silva," "Nicolas de Stael." "This painting finds its echo, its source, in these geometric forms - bare or baroque - from walking around the building sites and factories that allow us to harvest more easily." "In what way has architecture contributed to the youth of the new landscape?" "This view is familiar to us." "It's now a classic in the same league as Notre Dame and Place de la Concorde." "But the audacity of the engineer Eiffel deeply shocked people back then." "Iron architecture has not changed the face of the world as was believed - or feared - at the end of the 19th century." "With hindsight, it seems very moderate." "But it is nearly always endowed with a robust and opulent elegance, particular to the Belle Epoque." "Paris owes to it one of its most beautiful sites." "The over ground part of the metro along the Boulevard de la Chapelle before Canal Saint-Martin." "Admire the grace of the long curve." "Since the Egyptians and the Greeks, man has been obsessed by the shape of the portico which explains our ancestral fear of heaven." "Added to that, we see the reminiscence of the roller coasters and other slides of the funfairs." "The style is hybrid, the Doric columns and the Louis XIII pediments show the timidity of the builder." "Seen from above, from the metro, the landscape is endearing." "A quick view of the elegant Rotonde of Paris, the remains of the enclosure of the farmer generals." "Its beauty surpasses the beauty of our viaduct but their proportions fit together and they don't look disagreeable next to each other." "It was built by the famous architect Ledoux, a pioneer, in the 18th century, of the industrial aesthetic." "Nearby, over Canal Saint-Martin, is another charming example of iron architecture." "Its grace, slightly exotic, owes nothing to Greek, Roman or medieval pastiches but more to the Japanese, who at the same time allowed Van Gogh to reveal himself." "200 metres further, two other bridges." "The first one, the humpback bridge, is for pedestrians, while the other, which is reserved for vehicles, goes up to give way to the barges thanks to cables sliding on big pulleys." "These bare cogs have the inelegant, and simultaneously elegant air of the first bicycles and sewing machines of our grandparents." "This isolated area of Paris has kept its end-of-the-century charm and it would be only with bitterness that we abandon it to the demolition machines." "A whole era has passed that goes well beyond the 19th century until the post-war years." "The era of the electronics and the atom will follow the era of the coal." "In the world of technology, everything gets old too quickly and these factories, only fifty-years old, seem to be older than other hundred-year-old buildings." "They have the melancholy of things that are doomed to disappear sooner or later." "Sometimes, ironically, the factory returns to the earth, and, like this brickyard, is transformed into a cowshed." "Finally, let's have an indulgent look at this industrial landscape that is starting to enter history." "The factories of the future will go and hide behind the woods in the countryside." "Where the sickly suburbs used to be will soon rise a new world - clean, neat, tidy." "Our reasons to be delighted are stronger than our regrets and we hope that the future landscape of our lives will leave the way open to reverie."