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An Incomplete Paris Gets Penciled In On The Fly

In "Paris, Archi’llusion," the iconic buildings and monuments of the city are boiled down and warped.

Intimately tied to its iconic architecture, Paris just wouldn’t be the same with the slightest alteration of its infrastructure, right? Essentially, that’s what Menilmonde duo Claire & Max explore in their imaginative film Paris, Archi’llusion.

Claire & Max boil down the project as picturing “all the buildings and monuments of Paris with only one or two floors," an experiment with our perceptions of architecture—and, surely, how those perceptions affect our sense of place.

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Above, Paris’ Gare du Nord, a large terminus station that connects the city to Northern France and neighbors Belgium and the Netherlands, gets this shrunken treatment.

While the building usually stands a good deal over passersby, in Paris, Archi’llusion, the top is visibly lower. Of course, because not everyone is intimately familiar with the structure, Claire & Max used various Photoshop filters to fill in the missing pieces of the Gare du Nord as if they were being drawn in.

They gave The Louvre a similar treatment, as well.

To get the shrunken look, the duo took dual videos of the the legendary art mecca, and later lowered the first plane onto the second until achieving the desired effect.

Of course, Paris is Paris for more than its verticality. So, Claire & Max also tinkered with various spaces that help define the city's aesthetic essence.

And finally, watch Paris get treated like a magical sketchbook below. Does it still look like Paris, now?

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