MTNM Lunch Talks Presents: Quantum.ville

Join us for a new MTNM Lunch Talk on April 12, 2021 to meet with Grégoire Delzongle and Étienne Macquet, the creators of quantum.ville, a fictive company building a self-sufficient vertical city.

Grégoire Delzongle (born in 1990) and Étienne Macquet (born in 1993) met while studying at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, back in 2012.

In 2019, they started to work on the speculative design project quantum.ville during an art residency with the Atelier Médicis involving VR, AI messaging interfaces, CGI rendering, and graphic design; a project then awarded with the Grand Prix création en cours 2021 by the Atelier Médicis.

quantum.ville is a fictive company building a self-sufficient vertical city. The project aims at imagining a fully autonomous tower-city capable of hosting a modern society and all the public infrastructures (hospitals, schools, administrative buildings, prisons…), production facilities (farms and fields, factories, power stations…), and places for living (apartment blocks, offices, restaurants…) associated with it.

The tower is built according to general relativity theory: on each floor, time flows differently from the others; the higher the floor is, the faster time flows. Urban planning is designed to use the tower’s 21 time zones (floors) and take advantage of the different temporality between all floors.

As the project evolved, Étienne and Grégoire became employees of their own fiction. During three weeks, they changed a 4th-grade classroom into quantum.ville’s design offices and students were immersed in its bureaucratic fiction and protocols. Inside this performative set, students and quantum.ville’s collaborators debated society, philosophy, science, veganism, etc., and then designed a few different vertical cities.

You can learn more about the project on quantum.ville’s Instagram as well as on Ateliers Médicis’ website.