Machines de ville

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 Machine: 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.