Architectural Syntheses. Event and City. When the Extraordinary Transforms the Ordinary. The Mercè Festival and Barcelona

In the presentation of the doctoral thesis “Event and City. When the Extraordinary Transforms the Ordinary. The Mercè Festival and Barcelona”, by Anna Sala Giralt, PhD Cum Laude in Architectural Projects from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and curator at the Fundació Mies van der Rohe since 2014, the potential of extraordinary events in the city as a project tool will be explained. In her thesis, Sala explores situations in which the city becomes a laboratory for experimenting with strategies that transform the ways it is perceived, used, or lived differently.

This doctoral thesis, focused on the Mercè Festival and Barcelona, proposes observing these non-ordinary situations from an architectural and proactive perspective, understanding them as moments in which behaviors and regulations are paused to give way to different urban conditions, creating a latent space for the spontaneous, the unexpected, or the unprogrammed. In these situations, the apparent capacities and qualities of space and its use can be pushed to the limit, valuing the extreme as an opportunity to reveal new possibilities yet to be discovered. These are spaces of manifestation that allow other ways of understanding and traversing the city to emerge, taking advantage of an architectural sensitivity through the experience of the extravagant.