The Semester: Barcelona Summer Studio 2012.  Washington University in St. Louis
The Site: Plaça del Duc de Medinacelli, Barcelona, Spain.
The Event: La Merce Festival
The Date: Summer 2012

The Program: The program of the project includes the neighborhood scale and city-scaled activities of La Merce festival.  A flexible intervention in the site that allows for exhibitions, storage, maintenance and repair for the giants that can be transformed into a performance space during La Merce Festival.  There is a dichotomy of scale the human and the giant and a fluidity of program transitions from the public event to the private spaces.

The Project:  Barcelona is a city steeped in history. The giants have been a part of the Catalan tradition harking back to written documents in 1424.  Architecture is intertwined with the site, with the city.  The new respects the old.  The intervention respects the existing building by retaining all three of the buildings original facades while puncturing a larger aperture in the facade for the scale of the giants.
The building speaks to the structure of the giants as well.  The body is the inner core structure that is shrouded with the costume, the outer shell that flows around the body as the costume dress of the giant would flow around the legs of the man beneath.
The building is a manifestation of my impressions of Barcelona.  Sensuous, intuitive, and playful. 

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El Vestit by Jennifer A. Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.