Shumi Bose/KOOZ The title of your new exhibition is Emotional Heritage, at arc en rêve in Bordeaux. We can start with ‘heritage’ — it's quite a heavy word. In France, for example, the word has a particular weight, with a nationally-approved catalogue of heritage buildings. Perhaps more recently, the question of heritage can be understood with greater subjectivity. As you suggest in the exhibition, value and resonance can be found almost anywhere.

Ricardo Flores Yes, I think that value is what we call heritage. Both between ourselves and in our writing, we always say that for us, heritage is not something that comes from the top, where someone declares what is important. It is common and belongs to everyone, to common memory. We find that the important thing to preserve is the everyday life of cities and places; the memories of people are the most valuable aspects to save.

KOOZ Does this sympathy for preservation come from something personal? Were you familiar with a building or a neighbourhood that was demolished?

Eva Prats In fact when we were starting out as architects in the late 1990s, it was a moment of huge urban renovation in Barcelona. We witnessed the old town under renovation — which meant indiscriminate demolition in some places: whole city blocks, without even knowing exactly what was there. We had friends living in houses that were incredibly precious examples of their time — very well built, with a culture of building that comes from knowing how to work with stone, with geometry, how to cut things and how to draw. We thought about what we would have to build in the future, without the benefit of all this culture. It was a shock for us: we asked ourselves how other architects did not appear to have any empathy for this. Why did they think there was no use in it? 

RF The Sala Beckett building was not protected. In our competition entry for the design, you had to decide whether to keep it or not — it was up to you. The director of the theatre company, when introducing the building to all the competition teams, said “I love the building because it's full of marks and traces of the things that have happened — but I'm not a technician and I also need it to work as a contemporary theater. It should perform well.” We loved everything in the building too; for us, it was a container of stories and time. There was an accumulation of things that we wanted to embrace, but at the same time we had to wonder how this place would perform technically. 

KOOZ You started your practice around the turn of the millenium; at that time in Spain, it was all new construction. You must have felt somewhat out of the step — how did you maintain that?

EPWe enjoyed it. The ‘everyday’ was very good for us. The commissions that came our way were mostly for renovations; we also entered competitions for renovations, as well as some social and collective housing.

RF We made one new building that was social housing, but mainly we were interested in reuse, and there were a lot of things to do.

EP We found the introduction to this kind of work fascinating, because at university in Barcelona, there were no exercises about reuse at the time — everything was about new construction. Instead, in our office, every project was another lesson for us, also with clients and how they perceived existing buildings.

KOOZ In the early 2000s, I daresay not many people used the term adaptive reuse?

RF Well, that was the moment of the new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. It was the starchitect's domain. Even in architectural discourse, professionals viewed reuse as a second-division subject.

EPWe understood it but sometimes you’d hear disparaging comments from older colleagues, like “That’s fine, if you’re happy doing renovations… ” I would think, what do they mean? We were happy doing renovations but as we realised, many people thought that authorship comes only when you start from scratch.

RF With reuse, the most interesting thing is the way that you collaborate with other generations. You speak to all of this with your pencil, discovering things that have been done by someone else with another program, in another moment, and it's very beautiful to contrast that with what you have today, in your hands. In adaptive reuse, drawing is really a collaboration with time, because you have all these things that add to your design. We love that sense when the balance between the building, the client, and the architect is in an equal relationship, with no one dominating the others.

KOOZ You have been doing this for thirty years. The field has caught up with you and the discussion around history, memory and heritage is more sophisticated than it was. Do you notice that change?

EPWe noticed that our work suddenly got more attention! We have always been working with the same intensity, but when Sala Beckett was finished, that was the one that got a lot of attention. Why? That was a moment when Europe started to look seriously at reusing old constructions —

RF … Finally! I think that society — at least in Barcelona — was finally prepared to look at old things and appreciate their value, embedded by historic use. Spain had experienced dark times under the dictatorship so after that, of course society demanded something new: public spaces for meeting, for example, and other functions that were not possible for many years. Slowly things relaxed and other interests rose to surface; people were done with erasure. Sala Beckett came at that precise moment, and we agreed with the client that it was a laboratory of tests — a visible kitchen of evolving functions, going back and forth. We were very aligned and the municipality was also interested in that idea.

Then too, we were inviting the co-operativists back into their former abode. New generations of people who were part of the cooperative were coming back into the building, saying, "My grandmother, my mother, came here…”

EP Some of the former co-operativists are still around, so there was a lot of talking with them, with living memory. The day that the bar opened at Sala Becket, two older couples came to play Scrabble. They said, ‘Finally you reopened!’ — they had been waiting.

RF People were aware that the building was falling apart; it was a ruin, just waiting for somebody to save it. At the same time, the Sala Beckett theatre company was kicked out from their former location of twenty or so years, and they asked for help from the municipality. It was a beautiful moment, a union of two entities that needed help from each other. The Sala Becket gave new life to the building, which was full of memories but really falling down.

Suddenly, this building became a manifesto of sorts. We were conscious that we were doing something quite radical by placing all eras of the historic building on an equal footing, without valuing one over another, without hierarchy. That was important: we were not recuperating the ‘original’ — why should one life be more important than another? A moment of decadence is as intensely lived as a moment during squatter occupation. This is not a usual approach in reuse.

EPThis comes back to the ‘heaviness’ of heritage — officially, heritage is very difficult to navigate. But the buildings on which we have been working are only partially protected. The Sala Beckett had minimal protection: you could draw it, document it, photograph it and tear it down. Such sites are protected from demolition, but you can work to accommodate them and adapt them to a new use — so it’s easier to work. When a building is too heavily protected, you can't touch it to make a programme fit. That’s the first rule of design in reuse: don't force things too much. Either the space works with a certain programme or not.

Listing almost any building opens a difficult dialogue. There are some pieces that are so beautiful that you want to preserve them as they are: they explain a certain history, they may even represent us. Yet there are a lot of buildings that are beautiful, but without the freedom to evolve, they will die.

RF A lot of the buildings from the late twentieth century that are obsolete already — big offices, which are horrible sometimes — are yet full of potential to host something. You might find possibilities in another kind of typology: if you start from zero, you’re probably going to use standard ceiling heights, but if you work on a building that has four metre ceilings, why not go with it? There are potentially beautiful exercises ad infinitum, as there are so many empty and abandoned buildings. This is the future challenge in Europe: to reuse history, more and more.

EP It is a very healthy mental exercise. As Ricardo was saying, you can probably find ways to be more generous and inventive, as you escape standards and known strategies,

KOOZ Far from being standard, the way you talk about your practice sounds — and forgive me — like embarking on a series of love affairs with buildings, each lasting several years.

RF It is, I think! This kind of love and empathy is necessary, an empathy for a place that you're going to work on, to be able to like to bring something into being. If you don't love what you see, it's very difficult to put that into play later on. There is a certain affection for a place that we try to foster, as if a site is something inherited from your grandmother. Then, even if it's dull or common or ordinary, it can be wonderful to work on it.

KOOZ Was that attitude itself inherited? You both worked with Enric Miralles and others too.

RF Yes, we did work with him and at the time we left the office, he was working with reuse. But the way we worked on Sala Beckett, for example, is not the same approach. We wanted the various eras of that building to feel simultaneous, so you don't really know who did what in terms of authorship — this was very important for us, because you engage with the processes of the building, and you start to participate in its history. Miralles’ architecture was more about bigger actions, demarcating new from old: it was wonderful and very powerful, but we detached from that and grew in a different way. 

EP In fact, our approach is something that we found even in Casa Batlló, by Gaudi. This is a beautiful example of renovation, and in the attitude that we share: there was an existing building that he enlarged and to produce this aquatic atmosphere, he carved into the existing facade. He was manipulating and working on the physicality and continuity of the building, rather than starting with the tabula rasa.

RF Our references included Carlos Scarpa, but he always detaches the eras: you can see the joints, very beautifully crafted, that are constantly separating history. Over time, we started to move more into a sense of continuity: not knowing and not showing these demarcations.

KOOZ What was the first project where you felt able to apply this approach?

EP Probably when we were working on the Mills Museum in Mallorca. There was a staircase where the stone was very beautiful, but it was too dangerous to use. We were talking with the builder, and we asked him what he thought about flipping the same stones around and applying them vertically. He said yes, probably we can and he did it. It was perfect. Then, when we were working on the connecting of this stone with the rendered surface. Coming from the Barcelona tradition, my initial instinct was to make the joint visible — to keep that distance that I learned from Scarpa and others. But then Ricardo suggested to make it continuous — and the effect was a surprise, like something we were always looking for.

RF For example you can find it in the churches of Borromini; the old masters never separated time. If you go to San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, you don’t know which part came before, and who did what — partly due to the shape or space, or the plastering, the way light reflects — it's very beautiful, the continuity of the light. This is what allows your eye or your mind’s eye to travel and dream without interruption.

That's the experience we want to achieve, where you are absorbed by the situation and its past, and you are thinking about your own past and memories. That immediately puts you in an intimate connection with the building. For that, your eye cannot be attracted by the nature of various interventions. All the technical services disappear in Sala Beckett — if they were visible, then they would suddenly interrupt and wake you up.

KOOZ One can see the most intense emotional engagement in your process of drawing, drawing and redrawing …

RF Drawing means taking the time to think, because we use drawing as a way of thinking. Drawing by hand is so connected with your mind that, in a very special way, you are making your thoughts visible. Then they are there for you to see, share with others, disagree with them and then discuss again through drawing. By discussing with a pencil in hand, you make your arguments visible, giving them a physical condition: these can evolve and be enriched. Especially when you visit a site for the first time, it can be overwhelming; you think about how things might transform, and wonder how to achieve that. The drawing is the space where these thoughts can be held together, with each subsequent drawing adding the layers of the time, programme, colour. The drawings are also containers, in a manner of speaking.

KOOZ You speak very passionately about drawing by hand; how easily is that accepted by the younger people in your office? It is not held in the esteem that it once enjoyed in architectural schools —

RF Fortunately enough, we've been teaching in Barcelona since we set up. There is some resistance, but we find that the younger generations are open to it. Recently, they are more interested in hand-drawing

EP We are finding a balance, as people are slowly starting to be critical with the computer.

RF In our courses, we ask students to draw by hand. Gradually, they embrace it; ultimately, they draw the whole thesis by hand — which is quite a challenge, within a limited time. More and more they understand the value of learning to think by hand. AutoCAD is something you learn as well, of course, but making visible what you think with your hand is very unique, and you have to learn that.

EP School is a beautiful moment of discovery. In any office that you want to enter, they will ask you to reflect on a particular task: you have to build a criteria, you have to decide what you like during your student years — not just following the rules of the computer and answering questions from the digital tool.

RF You have to learn to accept intuition; answering too many questions stops the construction of thought.

EP It's just you, the hand doesn't ask for anything. Thinking, focussing and concentrating on a piece of paper — a surface that does not flicker and glow — is an aid for concentration. When the class works together, everyone puts their thoughts in the drawings — and there is an exchange. They know more of each other.

KOOZ Seeing so many of your iterative models and drawings, students could also learn from the practice of retaining past experiments. You mention the presence of previous ideas, like friendly ghosts. Has this happened before, where a past idea has haunted another project?

RF When we travel and see something memorable, or even when we look at things that spark our memory, we often find ourselves trying to incorporate that density of intentions in our work. Our process of hand drawing helps to look at every project, every site, differently; you find echoes within your observations and each project is a new start. I'm much more obsessive than Eva in the sense of looking over things that we have already drawn, but which got lost along the way.

KOOZ I remember seeing your work at the Venice Biennale in the beautiful, bespoke ‘flight containers’ that we see in the exhibition, filled with past drawings, working models and fragments. Seeing all the layers of thinking, emotion and intensity at once was quite moving. When did this arrive, as a method of talking about your work?

EPWe had to make room for new projects, that was not an option. So we would collect all the models of a certain project that were around in the studio’s rooms, and decide how to keep them. It takes time to decide how to organise all that stuff inside a container —

RF First, you have to decide if things are going to be arranged chronologically or thematically. Then there’s shape, and how things will be viewed. It's a whole design project itself. Marcel Duchamp’s ‘boîte-en-valise’ method was an inspiration — this piece of luggage, made to hold all the elements of a story.

It’s not only models that we keep, but also drawings and documents that were part of the project. We like to think that they too contain a memory, a moment where you were thinking about something. It's a way of not losing the memory of something you’ve been working on for some time, which was important for you. It’s not always true that your most recent work is always your best, nor are previous processes forgettable. It’s about valuing the full extent of time that you work, through a collection of thoughts and moments .

KOOZ We began with the word heritage; the counterpart of your exhibition title — the “emotion” — pours out in the way you describe your work — and also in the way you talk about not losing things.

EP I think this is what comes through when we talk about the process. Also in academia, we put a lot of value on the steps within a project. Our students learn to archive and keep the processes, and they also learn to talk about them. This semester, I also found that students valued the process of archiving in connection with hand drawing. It took a while for them to accept it but two separate students noted, when collecting all the process drawings, that it was particularly good to have kept them to review. Working digitally, that critical act of review had never been possible in the same way; they were finding it useful to collect and remember.

KOOZ You allow time for students to engage with the site, experiment with drawing and then to reflect on those attempts. Perhaps due to anxieties around employment, many students and designers attempt the transformation of data directly into design.

RF Well, yes; it's more about discovering a solution, rather than it appearing like the Virgin Mary! When you draw what is already there, your mind starts to wake up and wander; your own thoughts, memories and the influence of other authors mix as they come and go. Eventually, you start to make a little change to what you find; you begin to adjust to the programme. It's very much an iterative meditation, not knowing where you're going to go. If you know where you're going to go, what's the fun? That’s why all projects are new, despite the presence of the past.

KOOZ Your projects often involve a long engagement with the site, from initial visit to extended documentation. How do you give your clients the courage to trust that long duration?

EP For us, the project starts there, [in getting the client] on the site. When we get to know the building with the client, questions come up and so the work begins. If there is an existing building, the design process has already started, because everyone will observe and give value to different things. We try to look without being overly selective on site; this reflection happens in the studio, and it’s on the foundations of these reflections that we build the project. In the school, at least a third of the semester is spent on getting to know the site, the programme and making drawings. It’s a process of actively knowing; there's a rhythm to it, so you don't feel you're losing time.

RF Then when we show our material to the clients, the discussion remains open-ended because hand drawings are open to opinions; they are sketches or unfinished; the models are working models. You can engage immediately into the conversation around processes, and they understand that you are looking for an extra quality. Maybe it takes a bit longer but sharing the process means that they understand why; they are with you and that's very important.

KOOZ You mentioned that models usually come after the drawings. Are they more for you or for the client?

RF The models are really for us. Of course, they are a good medium to communicate with people, within or outside your office, or even outside the discipline of architecture. It's a very good element for exchange and dialogue. Also specific solutions like the placement of skylights — the models help you to see that.

EP I think that they also help us to pause in our drawing. Models are very useful for testing or fine-tuning ideas, the thickness of things, the proportions. For instance, whether the space will be too big where you may want to feel more discreet. And then you can go back to the drawing board.

RF Sometimes the drawings are not quite complete, and the model has more things to tell you, so then you have to document that too. It helps you to go beyond the requirements of the programme; these processes are the ones that really make you sure about what you're going to build, rather than the render.

KOOZ With the sophistication of digital image technologies, we have certainly learned to have more confidence in machines than in ourselves. Perhaps this is where the emotion comes in.

EP That's what we want to awaken in students — but they have to have the confidence in them. Each of them needs to develop their personalities, like different societies have to find their expression. Even if you find things on the computer, it's really for you to work through your eyes and experiences. Every architect proposes more than what they are asked; you give extra, that emotional part.

KOOZ What a beautiful note to close out. At a time when our roles and agencies are under interrogation, what a pleasure to hear architects speak so passionately about what you can give. Thank you so much.

BIOS

Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats are the founders of Flores & Prats, an architecture studio based in Barcelona and established in 1998. The studio combines design and constructive practice with intense academic activity, in which research is always linked to the responsibility to make and build. Its work regularly addresses rehabilitation and reuse, social housing and urban public spaces. Eva Prats is a Professor at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio. Both partners are Associate Professors at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona ETSAB-UPC, and have held visiting positions at schools including ETH Zürich, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Columbia University GSAPP in New York. The office has been widely awarded, published and exhibited, including displays across four editions of the Venice Biennale of Architecture and four nominations for the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 2005, 2015, 2016 and 2017. Their most recent publication is ‘Building Communities – Rehabilitation and Housing in Barcelona and Zurich’ (C2C Spain/ETHZ, 2024)