Outsider Environments Europe: Pierre-Alain Michel, Village miniature / Miniature village

July 01, 2022

Pierre-Alain Michel, Village miniature / Miniature village

pictures are screenprints from the 2'46" video,

re-use licensed under Creative Commons

In 2019

showed a small sign under a mailbox along a road in Belgium that referred to Le Village.

This sign has since been replaced by another one from enamel, which refers to Le village miniature, and that's what his post is about: a miniature village in the backyard of a house in the community of Trooz, south-east of Liège in Belgium.

the miniature village seen from the air

Life and works

This art environment was created by Pierre-Alain Michel, about whom, apart from that he is married and a secondary school teacher, no further biographical information is available.

In a comment on Facebook, he is described as a driven and humble man

In 1995, on a rectangular strip of land at the back of his garden, Pierre-Alain Michel began creating the miniature village, that shows the Trooz community on a scale of about 1;10.

The buildings, initially made of tarred wood, later of PVC, comprise all types of a municipality the size of Trooz, such as a school, a chapel, a music dome, a police station, a hotel, shops and residences.

One of those houses is special, because smoke comes out of the house as if it were on fire. It is of course a simulated scene, but the event entails that a fire engine comes at full speed to extinguish the fire.

This scene says something about the intention behind the design of this miniature creation, namely a representation of reality as faithfully as possible.

This is also apparent from the way the roads have been constructed.

First of all, the track of the road is deepened a few centimeters, a gravel bed is laid in it, first covered with a layer of sand mixed with cement, and then with a 2 cm thick layer of reinforced concrete with chicken wire, and finally these three layers are finished with a layer of tar.

This approach to road construction also means that these roads have such a strong structure that they can be walked on by adults.

The solidity of the road construction has its counterpart in the accuracy of the construction of road markings, traffic signs, traffic lights and public lighting.

The attention to this aspect of the representation of miniature villages, which also emerges from the images in this post, gives this Belgian creation its own unique place among the other miniature villages in Europe.

Behind the precision with which Pierre-Alain Michel shaped road signs and public lighting,

for its part, there is a great interest in this type of material. For operating the traffic lights in the miniature village he managed to obtain a switch box, which indeed controls the lights there.

He also gradually collected a collection of disused traffic signs, work lamps and the like.

In recent years, Michel increasingly got the idea that these items would not look out of place in a museum and so it happened that in the summer of 2021 he announced the creation of a Musée de la Signalisation Routière et de l'Eclairage Public (Museum of Road Signs and Public Lighting)

A Facebook page of the same name was launched in August 2021.

The question of how the museum will be accommodated is still under investigation