La Machine: Machines de ville

by David Mangin (Preface)

Inside the world of La Machine’s fantastical street theater, from mechanical bestiaries to urban spectacles Since 1999, French production company La Machine has been creating live events and installations with astounding, gigantic mechanical animals and performing machinery. Through four exemplary projects in Nantes, La Roche-sur-Yon, Toulouse and Calais, La Machines de ville demonstrates how the elegant dynamics of this mechanical bestiary relate to space and to human performers.

This fully illustrated book charts the daily lives of the company, its members, artists, technicians and artisans, and how they undertake such visionary projects of mechanical urban architecture in order to create fantastically scaled dragons, minotaurs, frogs, crocodiles, spiders, mammoths and many other creatures.

In intricately detailed and labeled drawings and full-color photographs of the machines at every stage of their life, from construction to performance, the stories of these machines―and the people who build them―are collected here.

160 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2021

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this on a visit to the Hall of Machines in Toulouse, and it's good not only as a souvenir of that trip, but also as an overview of other projects they've been involved in across France. What's interesting is that these are not just isolated machines, but that Delaroziere makes the effort to research the locations to be used, so as to be sure that he creates a story which integrates into the public spaces of the towns that host his creations. The only thing this book was missing for me was a little more technical information on how the creatures are constructed and operated.