A disturbingly original event stands out in Laming's work: the construction of Futuroscope Park in Poitiers. Original because it grounds an experience that projects well beyond its own boundaries; disturbing because it is all condensed in one single point.The premises underpinning Futuroscope Park already embraced the guiding principles of contemporary architecture: the concept of"image" epitomised by the very nature of an exhibition-education "park"; a sense of projection into the future designed around the twentieth-century notion of progress as a deliberate "breaking" with the past; a feeling for the "virtual" nature of reality,blocked on the threshold separating the concreteness of things from their transparent electronic embodiment.

Architecture is putting in order invisible tensions,on earth, in space, in the spirit and in materials.The work of the young French architect Denis Laming is right on the borderline separating the present from the near future.All his works - from the huge Futuroscope Park in Poitiers to the Omnivest Business Park in Denver - feature the kind of forms which not only buildings but also cultural habits and lifestyles will presumably have to embrace over forthcoming decades. Without ever forcing his structures beyond the bounds of the latest technology and the kind of architecture most attentive to progress and innovation, Laming has devised an architectural idiom embodying a form of modernity already projected beyond itself, as the conquests of the past provide a foretaste of our expectations for the future.

Introduction

by Maurizio Vitta

Works

Futuroscope Park, Poitiers

Futuroscope Pavilion

Kinemax

Omnimax

Vienne Pavilion and Magic Carpet

Imax 3D

International Prospective Institute

Multimedia Center

Teleport

Physics Education and Research Center

Conference Center

Lentille

National Tele-learning Center

TGV Station

Catholic University and Library, La Roche-sur-Yon

Institute of Science and Technology, La Roche-sur-Yon

Scienceland, Shanghai

Pacific Science Center and Boeing Imax~, Seattle

Omnivest Business Park, Denver

Atlantis, Poitiers

Ecumenical Center for the Study of Religious Images, Poitiers

List of Works

Biography

Collaborators