October 2024
Beginner to intermediate
208 pages
2h 46m
English
by Mark Erlich
In 1910, the French artist Villemard created a series of illustrations imagining life in the year 2000. In one of his drawings, an architect sits in a booth pushing buttons on a console to manipulate a series of machines operating in the usual debris of a construction site. The various machines cut, shape, lift, and place stone blocks to build a house. There are no human laborers in his projection—mechanization has made them obsolete.
Villemard’s vision has not panned out, however. On the contrary, industry observers routinely deride the lack of technological sophistication in the construction industry and have pigeonholed it as old-fashioned and lagging behind more forward-looking ...
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