Marusia Popova + Jessica Vasilisa Skitalinsky

The site of the Congress Center proposal lies in the city of Alicante. Its 25th-century history was lost amidst the ruins of the Civil War. Alicante was rebuilt, unbound to the histories it preceded. Reconfiguring the context and building into a new coherence, the Congress Center strives to project onto the future.

Void of conceptions for commonly unoccupied proposals for Convention Centers, this thesis attempts to reclaim the congress grounds for the people and find ways of occupying them.

The Congress is a public container that holds a range of condensed, self-contained volumes of discrete programs within a vast and generous emptiness. The unscripted public form is shaped through the means of examining an array of non-hierarchical conditions of ground to volume to envelope within a single body.

Expanding the boundaries of architectural relations, our thesis forefronts the territory of public fields.