ANATOMY OF A BUILDING / Paris, France, 2011

The retrofit of a showroom in Paris became a lens to expose the hidden anatomy of a building site. Beneath the surface of clean interiors, the construction site reveals a complex choreography of human and non-human actors: contractors, subcontractors, migrant workers, engineers, designers, bureaucrats, dust, water, concrete, deadlines, and regulations.

The site unfolds as a contested terrain. Power circulates through technical drawings, language barriers, wage hierarchies, materials in motion, and legal frameworks. In this anatomy, infrastructure is not neutral; it is built through asymmetries of labor, legal entanglements, and environmental frictions.

In an ex-post reflection, the project interrogates who builds our architectures, under which conditions, and through which invisible negotiations. It foregrounds the material, social, and political metabolism of construction.

In 2011, Romania had just entered the European Union, bringing peripheral labor forces to central construction markets. Having previously witnessed extreme labor inequalities in Dubai, I informally advocated for Romanian immigrant workers on site. Subcontracted under precarious conditions, their work made visible the structural asymmetries embedded in the global circulation of labor.

Credits
Client: Fortebís Group
Final Client: Italian Fashion Company
Local Architect: Pierre Marceau
Direction of Works: Steven Shelledy
Mechanical Engineering: Cavazzoni Associati
Bureau de Control: Qualiconsult
R.U.S Site Vendôme: Yann Lecointre
Security: Guy Chapoutot
Lighting: Balestreri Lighting
Finishing: Zampieri