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Summary.
In 1910, the French artist Villemard created a series of illustrations imagining life in the year 2000. In one of his drawings, an architect sits in a booth pushing buttons on a console to manipulate a series of machines operating in the usual debris of a construction site. The various machines cut, shape, lift, and place stone blocks to build a house. There are no human laborers in his projection — mechanization has made them obsolete.