Legend has it that when Le Corbusier visited Montevideo and saw the Palacio Salvo for the first time, the city’s most iconic building, he commented: “it looks like a dwarf wearing a top hat.”

I had always wanted to create a graphic piece based on that anecdote, like a joke for the people from Montevideo, so I decided to do it as a motion graphics piece.

I took a photo of the Palacio Salvo and applied a filter to take it out of the present time, designed the visual treatment using typography as a mask over the image, and then animated the text so that the building is gradually revealed as the message is read.

At first, I wanted the text to be in French (to stay true to the original anecdote), but then I realized most people wouldn’t understand it, so I translated it into English.