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Cyprien Gaillard's professional success has come early. At 27, the vibe he projects makes the tired art-world-nomad metaphor feel less apt than art world orphan. Since he left Lausanne's Ecole Cantonale des Beaux Arts a few years ago, he's floated from art fair to biennale, group to solo exhibit. He has an apartment in Paris, but he's never really there. When escorting his art does not keep him on the move, producing it does. Gaillard belongs to the school that considers "studio-based practice" lame, anyway. He's been going east. On a road trip through the former eastern bloc last year he shot Desniansky Raion, the 30-minute film that showed at last year's ArtBasel Unlimited, attracting the attention of a vast array of critics, curators, and fashion magazines, and firmly establishing what the French press terms "Le phénomene Cyprien Gaillard."

In Gaillard's work - which might, imprecisely, be called "conceptual" - brutalist tower blocks are common protagonists. Gaillard had them painted into the traditional Swiss landscapes he commissioned while still at art school, and has inserted them into 17th-century Dutch etchings using Photoshop. As the artist explains, he's not so into craft - which "kind of takes you away from your subject matter." For Desniansky Raion the artist - who also takes a very of-the-moment line on content-ownership - combined his own Eastern European highrise tour with footage he begged, borrowed or stole.

Still from 'Desniansky Raion' (2007)

Gaillard's subjects get reactions. Tower blocks run a pretty high semiotic charge, though perhaps not always the same one. This architecture was built across North America, Western and Eastern Europe to absorb whatever grandiose ideology might be projected onto it. Today the buildings that compel Gaillard radiate the passing of the communist era, to the obsolescent ideal of the welfare state, urban blight and violence, depending as it were on the position of the viewer. In the art context they're inevitable signifiers of "modernism" - seeing them destroyed tends to be arousing.

Modernist architecture isn't exactly new territory for contemporary art. But Gaillard's particular approach may only be available to an artist whose social consciousness has been shaped after Reagan, Thatcher, and the fall of the Berlin wall. Critic Jean-Max Colard called Desniansky Raion a "visual opera", and in a way it is. The three-part melodrama (which also has a bad ass soundtrack) is emotionally rousing, and historically free-wheeling. We start in Serbia's western suburbs in 2006, romp through a gang battle in St Petersburg, visit the French town of Meaux (now in 1986, thanks to found footage) where a sound and light show preceded the histrionic demolition of a housing project, and end up in a helicopter over Kiev. It's all rather swashbuckling.

The artist's contextual detachment has occasionally been misinterpreted. Once while in Switzerland, Gaillard told me, he was struggling with the issue of how to make work about the highrises without "just making a pretty picture." He began leading bus tours to a local housing estate. French TV came along on one of his junkets, which resulted in a three-minute spot on the rise of "socioeconomic tourism". "It was horrible," Gaillard laments. They got it all wrong. He is not interested in poverty. He is not interested in social realism, or even critique. Gaillard seems most interested in the tragic heroes - in this case, the buildings.

'Real Remnants of Fictive Wars (Part 6)'

Gaillard's favorite artists are "all the ones that died before they were 35." That covers the big names in American land art - Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. He has already made a tribute book of sorts titled "Land Art's not dead." He celebrates entropy, bringing to one of Smithson's favorite concepts an attitude that the latter didn't quite share. He calls his obsolescent tower blocks monuments - presumably they're something like suburban ruins in reverse - in reverse.

That said, Gaillard also has something in him of another of his favorites in the "lived hard, died young" category - the handsome Dutch conceptualist Bas Jan Ader. Known for his enigmatic works 'Please Don't Leave Me' and 'I'm too sad to Tell You', Ader made a career out of the elision of irony and nostalgia years before it was written into the operating system of a generation. (Ader conceived his final prank as the last installment of a sort of "transcendental gesamtkunstwerke"; in 1975, at the age of 33, he sailed away from his wife Mary Sue on a transatlantic voyage, in a 14 foot boat and was indeed never seen again.)

Gaillard himself broadcasts the image of a sort of prankster Romantic. A tagger, a mash-up artist, a dude who sets off "indoor fireworks" - as he did for visitors to a recent solo show on the island of Vassieres - a guy who has no problem making a beautiful book of "stolen images." He's big into vandalism - as a concept, phenomenon, and an artistic practice. The project 'Real Remnants of Fictive Wars' - involved getting a hold of industrial-strength fire extinguishers, hauling them out to bucolic spots, letting of enormous Caspar David Freidrich clouds of sulphur, which the artist filmed and photographed. According to Gaillard, the landscape is renewed as it reemerges from behind the temporary clouds. They certainly look sublime.

When I met Gaillard, he was in Berlin, about to pitch his idea for the Berlin Biennale. We are around the same age. He was talking about professionalism. How does one deal with being invited to show at the Biennale only a few years into one's career? And for that matter, what does it mean to have a career in art? He was wondering about the generosity - is it good to turn oneself inside out for each exhibit? Gaillard imagines, sometimes, that he may not stay in the commercial art world forever.

For his biennale commission Gaillard originally wanted to do nothing. The site allotted to him - a yard of concrete and weeds along the wall's former "death strip" - was perfect as is. Leave it, he reckoned, or maybe buy it, and dedicate it as a sort of monument to itself, against development. That wasn't going to fly, so next he thought maybe a palm tree. Just alone, in the middle of the lot, it would set off the cement landscape. (Turns out the palm tree thing was already done in Warsaw, by an artist named Joanna Rajkowska.) By day two he'd come up with a winning idea. The curators were thrilled. Gaillard's work will be on view when the Biennale opens, on the night of April 4th.

Once the pitch had been bagged, Gaillard suggested a field trip. We visited the Parc Sans Souci in Potsdam, which is about as far outside the Berlin as Passaic is from New York.

1:15 pm - Bahnhof Ostkreuz: S7 train to Potsdam.

AR: Why are you interested in highrises?

CG: I'm interested in what I called un-authorised ruins. Recently I've been interested specifically in Scottish highrises. I've been going to film in Glasgow, where they're demolishing a lot of old towerblocks in preparation for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

AR: When you demolish a building like that, how does it come down?

CG: There are different techniques - and the choice normally winds up being political. They have the option of not using dynamite. There's this new method, which is less expensive, really ecological, and generally causes less trouble. You go to the middle story, and then you just push all the walls to one side, in order to collapse them, and then the weight of the top half of the building, falling on the bottom, crushes it. But dynamite's is really sort of glorious - glass exploding out, everything. All demolitions in Glasgow happen on Sundays at noon.

AR: In the states the demolition of this modernist high-rise public housing has been a really emotional thing - people have really bought into the idea that the buildings themselves are bad - and if you demolish the buildings you'll get rid of the social pathologies associated with them.

CG: When I'm in Glasgow, out at a bar or whatever, people often ask why I like these buildings so much. They say they were horrible to live in. I'm not saying that people should continue living in them, I'm just saying that we should keep a few of these modernist buildings, empty, like a classical ruins, like a Scottish castles. To me everything's ruins, I see no difference between a towerblock or a bunker on the French Atlantic coast or a Greek or Egyptian ruin. The consequences of devaluing the artifacts of our recent history will be felt by future generations.

AR: There's a certain nostalgia involved your work, in your attitude towards these highrises. Would you say that's right?

CG: I try to fight nostalgia. Nostalgia only comes when I fail to save a building or a site. I was thinking of getting my gallery to buy one of these empty high rises, to preserve it, but then I don't want to become the conservator of these modern ruins. Being a conservator is horrible for an artist. I thought maybe I could sell these structures to a collector, as a kind of outdoor readymade.

AR: Neither of us is old enough to remember the political regimes under which they were built. What are you mourning?

CG: It's not about a place, you know, I'm not nostalgic for a place I didn't live in. It's more about being nostalgic for a kind of landscape. All cities look the same in Europe now, thanks to this ignorant crusade for urban renovation.

AR: I often think that a lot of the intrigue of Berlin for people our age - young Americans especially - is this feeling of proximity to big ideas of the past that we've never had any immediate contact with them.

CG: Sure, but for me Berlin is only the gates to Eastern Europe, if you like this idea you should go further east. Big Ideas then take a real physical presence. And of course cities are clearer, I mean less of these ugly recent buildings. I have been to cities only made of concrete and marble. To make Desniansky Raion I went to Kiev, to Belgrade, to Russia - I've been going farther east. What I hate is the idea of an artist looking at reality from the window of his studio and being like "Oh, this is so interesting." I always try to spend as much time as I can outdoors and when I find a landscape I like, I engage with it.

Still from Desniansky Raion, 2007

AR: How do you engage with it?

CG: For instance, there are two big projects that I want to do. You know how the London bridge or some French castles have been moved, rock by rock, and reconstructed? My main project, the work of my life, is to do the same for towerblocks. I mean, they cost a fortune to demolish - if I could somehow use the money (and then find more money), I would relocate them on a big piece of land in the south of France and create a park. There would be a few from Glasgow and Sheffield, and a few from Paris and from Marseille, and a few from Kiev, the same way Piranesi would make a caprice. The place would become a 21st-century park of ruins as well as my sculpture park.

The second is a monument to dead buildings using the very same concrete of the building itself, to make a kind of big grave, at the exact spot where the building was killed. That piece will be called The Death of Architecture and The Architecture of Death. I am actually working on the first monument in Pollockshaw, Glasgow. It will hopefully be a 30 feet high concrete Obelisk.

AR: What do you mean the "concrete of the building itself"?

CG: What they do with the rubble after a demolition is actually really interesting. Basically, they take away all the glass, the wood, the metal, until it's only concrete left, then they demolish all the parts of the building until it's small rocks, and then they recycle it - so you don't know it, but you find the former building all over. The ghost of modernism's in the roads, the schools, in the parking lots.

AR: I guess that's part of a long tradition. All over Europe you find pieces of buildings that were sacked during the Middle Ages built into other buildings of the same period.

CG: I really think that not much has changed. One of Smithson's favorite Nabokov quotes was "the future is the past in reverse." What I mean is - well - if we think the future is going to be more slick, more modern - there's no way. We're basically going to chaos, to more obscure ages, back to medieval times. You just have to look at the images of the riots in Paris to understand that it's all happening.

That's why I got so upset at this woman in Glasgow, the one in charge of the commonwealth demolitions - she still thinks of the possibility of a new utopia, an Olympic village! But the buildings of Dalmarnock looked so incredible! It was like a prehistoric site. There were two facing one another - knocked one down and then the other. It was the only time I allowed myself to make a large format picture of a landscape. I took a large format picture of the rumbles of the building right after it had been blown up, a picture of this perfect hill of concrete, so harmonious, and this is what I am basically trying to say is that you can't stop the world of chaos, you can try to slow it down by recycling, but if we accept this entropic situation we are leaving in, then we will find a new form of harmony, stability within chaos.

And this print of this hill of concrete symbolises this new equilibrium that happens after the chaos produced by a demolition. I sent the slide to Duesseldorf to be processed by the same printer as Ruff and Struth use. Same size, same style - same frame, same everything. For me it's about the death of architecture, and the death of this style of photography as well. The image is really nice, it has this slick frame, like a coffin, and a little metal plate saying 'Millerfield Dalmarnock 1965-2007'.

Chateau Sans Souci: 3:15

AR: Must have looked a bit cheesy when it was first built.

CG: Yeah - [laughs] - New rich. If I were living here I'd throw big parties on these terraces. Each floor would be different groups of friends. I would put the architects way at the bottom. I would put artists up here; then after artists, I would put, maybe, musicians then philosophers. And then on the next terrace, directors - and then after that maybe fashion designers, then I would put graphic designers way down - way down by the architects. Industrial designers too.

AR: You don't have a lot of respect for architects. Too much rationalism, or what?

CG: I don't care so much about architecture as I care about landscape. I love Scotland because you go and there are fields of green, and then there are these structures: it's amazing. You can't not be moved, it's the laws of the picturesque. Formally, they just look so nice. The buildings of today or horrible, just look at the Glasgow city center, or Newcastle or all the new buildings of Manchester, such a rip off, no honesty, or even Potsdamer Platz, next to Mies Van der Rohe's Neue National Gallery, all these buildings also made of glass and steel but just look so stupid and worst of all make the people who use them look even more stupid.

'Belief in the age of disbelier'

Parc Sans Souci, 4:40 pm

CG: My park could have some landscaping as well. Imagine a big corridor of trees - like this one - and then a towerblock at the end. Wouldn't it be nice?

AR: What does "vandalism" mean for you?

CG: It's quite simple. The first time I came across the concept "vandalism" it had to do with my teenage activities, really: skateboarding and graffiti. And I thought that these practices were really interesting, really rich. Both sort of strong, and free. These scenes produce a lot of artists. But I felt that the art that was coming out of them just represented a failure to recreate this energy that was once really strong into a white cube, you know? And all that's left over is iconography and lifestyle, which doesn't work for me. I see public vandalism as a kind of new form of land art, I use it to ruin a landscape, to reveal it, I love it when entropy meets vandalism, the two main ingredients to make a modern ruin.

AR: But if you had to choose another word?

CG: What else is there? This is vandalism - pouring 1000 tons of asphalt on a hill just outside Rome like Smithson did - isn't that vandalism? Destroying something that doesn't belong to you - this is the definition of vandalism. And what the state is doing with these buildings is a form of vandalism. They gave them to the people, now they're taking them back. Because I see them as monuments, I see it as a certain kind of vandalism to demolish them. But it's a kind of vandalism that I hate. Usually I love all the forms of vandalism, because it just redraws the landscape, you know? You know the French word relativiser? In English "to put a matter in perspective". This state vandalism puts all other forms public vandalism in perspective - especially the vandalsim caused by the Paris riots of 2005 that got so much media coverage.

AR: It strikes me that "vandalism" is a really anthropocentric concept. You take a lot of cues from the Land Art movement, but as I understand it, Smithson had a more cosmic conception of time, history, entropy; your interest seems to me more human.

CG: Not really, I mean, things change, I think that a lot of the works done by land artists in the 60 and 70s could never be done today, I mean with the ecological consciousness we have now. Can you imagine Michael Heizer blowing up an entire cliff to make his 'Double Negative' sculpture at the edge of the Mormon Mesa, in the Nevada desert today?

Park Sans Souci, 4:45

AR: Am I making you nervous taking pictures?

CG: What makes me nervous is when the night falls. A really romantic thing for me is the time that passes by; in my case worrying about not getting enough done. Good photographers are either really rigorous, or really fucked up, you know? Photographers that get drunk all night, get the morning light - straight photographers who wake up before sunrise get the best light as well. The rest of them, the ones that wake up at 8 or later, are worthless.

CG: Look at these sculptures, they're so decadent! I've never seen this type of display. This would make a nice video. Everything that we love is kind of Fascist.

AR: I think it was more that Fascism marshaled all those images that we kind of love.

CG: Hitler said to Speer, his architect: "Make me buildings that, even destroyed will look monumental." I don't like fascism, but I guess I like the iconography of it sometimes.

S7 Potsdam to Berlin, 5:25 pm.

AR: You said yesterday that you're kind of a nomad right now and I wonder how that rootlessness works itself out in your approach. Does it give you a particular view of the places you visit - to "sites" for instance? All these places have their own local politics, maybe it take a certain distance to approach them as monuments?

CG: Yes it's true, I always make geographical analogies between different places, even if sometimes it's just a purely formal one, it allows not to be attached to one particular spot and falling into making an anecdotal work about some exotic place (for the viewer). I hope that my work transcends geographical places - I don't care so much about space, it's more about time in the end, ruins...

Being a nomad is a way of working that I love. I mean, artists travel a lot, but I really like small travels as well - to the suburbs, like this. What I'm struggling with now is that with all these shows coming up and the Berlin Bienniale I could use a studio. And so I'm going to have to have a working space. But I refuse to get a studio, but I think maybe I'll get an office. What I don't like is when you walk into a place, and reality is sort of suspended. So I called my dealer and said, you know, I want to be the last resister in this thing, I want to get a space in one of these '80s office buildings just outside Paris - go with salary men to work. So we found this office in a highrise in Paris's "twin towers" - they're called "Les Mercuriales" . It'll be like a work itself, that office. I'll have a desk and a leather chair. I want to know people! - the secretary, the people who work there. But it's quite expensive, a bit unnecessary, maybe. I also like this idea of living in the city and going to work in the suburbs.

AR: How do you want to grow?

CG: I might not stay in contemporary art forever, I think I'll move to a different sphere. I'm also really interested in being a sort of activist. I could be a tour guide on this piece of land, or people could come and visit my Park. For now, the art world's a shelter for me. I do things that make no sense anywhere else. I mean, I can't exactly work with the people who preserve historical monuments for the moment, they don't take me seriously, maybe I need to get older.

Cyprien Gaillard is represented by the Cosmic Galerie in Paris. He had a a solo show at the Atelier du Jeu de Paume, Paris, in February 2008, and has created a new commission for the Berlin Biennale which opens on 4 April.