Flores and Prats: Emotional Heritage
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Variétés Cultural Laboratory, Brussels. image / Adrià Goula
Cornell in Rome Fall 2024 Lecture Series
Flores & Prats is an architectural studio founded by Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores in Barcelona in 1998, dedicated to the confrontation of theory and academic practice with design and construction activity. The practice has worked throughout Europe on projects of adaptive reuse, social housing, and urban public spaces with the participation of neighbors.
Flores & Prats has received several national and international awards, including the Grand Award in Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts of London, the City of Barcelona Award, the City of Palma Award, the AD Architects of the Year (2018), and the AR New into Old Award (2019). The studio has also been nominated on several occasions for the Mies van der Rohe Awards and exhibited in the last five editions of La Biennale di Venezia, including in 2023 with their proposal Emotional Heritage at Le Corderie dell'Arsenale.
Besides their professional practice, Eva and Ricardo are Professors of Design Studios at the School of Architecture of Barcelona. Eva Prats is a Full Professor at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio.
Emotional Heritage
It is not only people that contain the memory of a place; the buildings, too are loaded with memories of the uses and lives that occupied them; the built fabric is a reflection of social behavior. It speaks of a way of using the ground, the sky, of a way of inhabiting—to read the memory held in buildings and in people is to think about a future that counts on that past.
When a building is closed and abandoned, it remains alive in the memories of those who live around it. The abandoned building is embedded with the civic and moral values that time has given it through its use, containing the stories of the people who experienced the place over the years and that have created an invisible constellation of social relationships that expand the influence of this construction to a universe around it, including to those that may form future associations with its materiality and story.
Recuperating and reusing an existing construction is to consider that it is part of an emotional heritage as much as a physical heritage, and an effort should be made to keep these memories inside the building. This is a design decision of major ideological importance because, for us, the idea of patrimony has nothing to do with what is valuable or monumental; it does not come from 'pater'; it cannot be imposed from above, but instead arises from time and experience, from what is radically collective.
