STRESS is fictitious industrial construction, whose only aim is to draw a perfectly straight red line that strikes through a wide landscape on the banks of Loire river estuary. It is drawn over 2 km between an oil refinery and some isolated grove, where it disappears. The line is not only a figure of utopia in a given landscape, not only a simple graphical idea, it is also a figure of all human ideas at work inside what we think as Nature and we idealize as harmony. Thus it is a sign of tension, raising the questions of excess – as opposed to adaptation – excess of products and excess of consumption of matter. The project also confronts the industry of its own making and the utopia it claims to represent. The stress would not just be some symptom of our difficult adaptation to the environment, the latter being spontaneously thought as autonomous. It is also the unavoidable shock of vain ideas and dreams, with a reality, which by essence is real, rough and quite foreign to our desires. This project was intended for Estuaire 2009 in Nantes (France) and was not accepted by the selection jury.