Lucía Martínez and Raquel Durán’s project “Immersion” has won the public’s prize at the 2017 edition of the Festival des Architectures Vives of Montpellier with the theme “Emotion.”

Emotion

According to the definition of emotion, not only the physical context but also a personal factor influences our emotional response to stimuli: memories, life experience, character or mood. This festival provides them with a site and, through its transformation, challenges to generate an emotion. These courtyards, that nowadays serve as passages, will become, for a few days, containers of emotion. The architecture team wanted to push this idea to its limits, filling one of the courtyards with balloons. Feeling like a sea of balloons, the installation drags the public to experience a total immersion. Some may find peace feeling isolated, hidden, protected. Others could return to childhood wanting to play out to exhaustion. An annoyed person could simply vent his frustrations and return to serenity all over again. Pleasure, euphoria, well-being, anguish, playfulness, disorientation… Whatever the case may be, the architects are convinced that nobody remained indifferent.

Data sheet

Location: Montpellier—France 

Schedule: June 13, 2017, to June 18, 2017 

Materials: 500 latex balloons 40 cm diameter/wood structure/30m² fishing nets/200 ml nylon rope

Dimensions: 6mx4mx3m

Architects: Lucía Martínez/Raquel Durán

Budget : 1650 € TTC

Photographers: Paul KOZLOWSKI © photoarchitecture

Lucía Martínez Pluchino ©LuciaMartinezPluchino

Raquel Durán Puente © RaquelDuranPuente

About the architects

Being able to shape the urban environment, develop adopted solutions to territorial and social changes, offer their skills and understanding of space and volume, as well as nourish their interest in design, art and technology are some of the reasons that brought Lucia Martinez and Raquel Duran to study architecture. Coming from different backgrounds and distant places, it was by chance that their paths crossed at the same architecture firm. For several months, they have been working on a residential project for the construction of 300 apartments. This has allowed them to work together and share ideas related to their profession and its development. Being immersed in this large-scale, long-term and multi-phase project, they became more sensitive to architecture’s playful character and the ephemeral nature of various interventions. The very idea of imagining, developing and even building this type of non-perennial architecture based on a concept, discussions and digressions, is what motivates them.