The facade of the “Espaces d’Abraxas” rises like a monumental city gate with its eighteen-storied columns, twelve kilometers East of Paris. This controversial project is also known as the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984), and it connotes everything from a penitentiary colony to Surrealist dreams and imagery. How does daily life unwind in these architectural scenographies of precast concrete? [flyer]

Conference speaker

Anne Kockelkorn has studied architecture at the l’École d’architecture de Paris-Belleville and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee. She had been a well-regarded independent architectural critic since 2006 and has joined in 2007 the team of ARCH + magazine in Berlin. From 2009 to 2012, she was research assistant to Laurent Stalder at the EPFZ. The Espaces d’Abraxas is the subject of her doctoral project, supervised by Philip Ursprung (gta-ETHZ) and Christian Schmid (Arch-ETHZ).