Léa Murawiec’s poster for Les Utopiales 2026 shows Nantes from three vanishing points at once. “Je me suis donné le défi de mélanger trois points de fuite”, she says on the festival’s poster page: I set myself the challenge of mixing three vanishing points. The 27th edition opened on Thursday 29 October at the Cité des Congrès de Nantes and runs to 1 November under one theme, Perspectives; a day ticket costs EUR 15. Whose eye sits at each of those three points?

The festival’s theme note answers in our own vocabulary. “La ville et l’architecture sont des personnages à part entière”, it states, citing Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!: the city and architecture are characters in their own right. Under the sub-theme on the plan it adds a sharper line: “Le plan est fondamentalement politique.” The plan is fundamentally political. Three rooms stage that sentence.

Room one: the facade as ledger

Murawiec’s Le Grand Vide (Éditions 2024, 2021, 204 pages) won the Prix du public at Angoulême 2022. Its English edition, The Great Beyond, translated by Aleshia Jensen for Drawn & Quarterly, received the 2024 Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent. In its city, attention keeps people alive and the forgotten fade. BoDoï’s Benjamin Roure reported the rule plainly: “si on vous oublie, vous mourrez”, if you are forgotten, you die. According to Leonard Pierce in The Comics Journal, the skyline is “towering buildings dotted with stylized names”, advertising people rather than products. What does an envelope record once it stops being shelter and becomes a ledger of who is remembered? It is the memory question in built form.

Room two: the shortest plan ever drawn

Room two, curated by the art historian Aurélien Vernant, brings Superstudio from the Frac Centre-Val de Loire in Orléans to mark 60 years since the group formed in Florence in 1966. Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia founded it, with Gian Piero Frassinelli, Roberto and Alessandro Magris and Alessandro Poli. The Continuous Monument of 1969 reduces a plan to a single gesture, one grid laid across the world. A plan reduced that far shows what every plan does. Natalini named the stakes in 1971: “if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture.” The Frac was founded in 1983 and holds 23,000 items, among them more than 16,000 drawings and about 900 models of experimental architecture. That archive is kept alive by registrars and conservators whose names never reach a wall label, and they are the reason a 1969 collage can still argue with us.

Room three: the section as diagnosis

Miel Vandepitte, born in 1998 and trained at LUCA School of Arts, draws cities that are ill in section. In Centralia the undergrounds are “dévorés par le feu”, eaten by fire. Dystopolis is “la dernière cité terrienne encore viable”, the last viable city on Earth, and its lower districts serve as a dump. Read it the way an architect reads a Schnitt. The section tells you who lives where, and who carries the weight of the floors above.

←TODAY: In 2026 a three-point perspective costs one camera tilt in a Rhino viewport. →3012: In Zurich-3012 every view ships with the plan it was drawn from, readable by everyone it depicts. Fulcrum: The drawing became free, and the plan behind it never did.

A perspective is a point of view with a plan behind it, and the plan is where the argument lives. The trade-off is plain: the upward tilt that makes a tower heroic also pushes the street, and the people on it, out of the frame.

Atelier: Offices now produce competition views faster than they can say what each view argues, and with AI renderers in the loop the image often arrives before the position does. Monday move: add one mandatory line to your Wettbewerb render checklist. Under every perspective, write a sentence naming whose eye level it uses and what the plan behind it promises the ground floor.

Hack: Store a tilted three-point camera of your current Rhino model as a named view, so the argument has an address. The script switches the viewport to perspective projection and places the camera at 1.7 m eye height. It then aims the camera 40 m up, which makes the verticals converge on a third vanishing point. Run it in Rhino 8’s Python editor and restore it from Named Views whenever the plan changes.

import rhinoscriptsyntax as rs
v = rs.CurrentView()
rs.ViewProjection(v, 2)
rs.ViewCameraTarget(v, (0, -60, 1.7), (0, 0, 40))
rs.AddNamedView("plan-argues-for", v)

The Swiss address is close. The Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains is showing “Inside Peeters”, devoted to the Geneva artist Frederik Peeters, until 3 January 2027. In Nantes, festival president Roland Lehoucq, an astrophysicist, opened with “Dépasser les apparences”, recalling that Galileo’s lens changed our perspective. Tilt your camera, then write down the plan that view defends.