'Immersion' by Lucía Martínez Pluchino + Raquel Durán Puente.

Lucía Martínez and Raquel Durán’s project “Immersion” has won the public vote at the 2017 edition of the Festival des Architectures Vives of Montpellier with the theme “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. The festival, which ran from 13 to 18 June 2017, provided the visitors with a site and, through its transformation, challenged to generate an emotion. The courtyards, serving as passages, became, for the duration of the festival, containers of emotion. The architecture team wanted to push this idea to its limits, filling one of the courtyards with balloons.

Appearing as a sea of red balloons, the installation encouraged the public to experience the felling of total immersion. Some visitors found peace by feeling isolated, hidden or protected. Others returned to childhood, wanting to play until exhaustion. Pleasure, euphoria, well-being, anguish, playfulness, disorientation… Whatever the case may be, the architects are convinced that nobody remained indifferent.

Being able to shape the urban environment, develop solutions for physical and social changes, as well as nourish their interest in design, art and technology are just 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.

See other projects with Balloons on Yellowtrace here.