This collection of satellite photographs shows how notoriously disconnected the layout of recent speculative building developments is from its natural environment.  "Welcome to the life you were waiting for" reads a real estate advertisement from the Costa del Sol. What kind of place will let you lead the life you are waiting for? What kind of resort will have you live the panoramic life? Exceptional features like “beach on top of the mountain”, “private planes in the back garden” or “golf in the desert” generate a composition of streets and squares in these pleasure towns that bare no relationship to the surrounding territory. The results are surprising, formally closer to a textile print than to an urban plan. These idealized town plans are created to suggest the perfect environment for a blissful life style. The urban plan is transformed into the very image of the promotion, its essential function of ordering space has been replaced by the necessity to verify the fiction.

Project: “Panoramic life”
Location: Gallery Knust x Kunz, München
Date: October 2014

Author: Julia Schulz-Dornburg
Collaborators: Eugenia Troncoso

Photography: Julia Schulz-Dornburg