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Think about a desk coated in massive sheets of tracing and drafting paper. Pencils, markers and a set of rulers, of all sizes and styles, are scattered alongside its floor. Huge quantities of masking tape maintain in place overlapping drawings and pictures. An architect’s desk lamp illuminates the work floor, shedding mild to the rubber crumbs, pencil shavings and smudges — unavoidable traces of hand drawing that reveal a distinct kind of (architectural) follow, a follow of “making.”
Situated in Barcelona’s historic heart, the Flores & Prats Architects is just not precisely a typical architectural workspace. It lacks the “cleanness” typically present in modern companies, the place open-plan areas are inhabited with massive tables, used for arranging iMacs in an orderly method along with housing the occasional desk plant. As an alternative, this specific studio is break up right into a sequence of (home) rooms, the place fashions are caught on the partitions and ceilings, drawings spill out of cabinets, and tables on wheels are at all times in a state of splendidly curated mess.
Flores & Prats was based in 1998 by Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores and combines design and constructive follow with tutorial exercise. The studio seems to be at analysis as a driving instrument for structure, producing numerous tasks open to public interpretation and significant considering. The follow is internationally acknowledged; it has been awarded numerous prizes all through the years and its work has been exhibited in monographic and collective exhibitions, whereas their first monograph e-book Thought by Hand. The Structure of Flores & Prats gives insights into their distinctive methodology of working.
Describing the Flores & Prats studio feels fairly romantic in at the moment’s context. It’s harking back to an period the place the architect was considered much less like a producer and extra as a sceptic, with hand drawing being a instrument for inquiry in addition to communication. Consequently, when contemplating the dearth of expertise within the studio’s course of, my query is: How do they do it? How are they in a position to not solely survive in such a quick paced world however truly thrive in it with out making the most of expertise’s “advantages”?
Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores are big advocates of hand drawing and by extent mannequin making. In response to them, analogue practices are inherently gradual, permitting room for creativeness and uncertainty, essential substances for making responsive structure. By abandoning the quick precision required when utilizing at the moment’s software program, the hand is free to discover and move by way of a spread of concepts, slightly than deal with resolving a single one. It turns into a mind-set.
Nonetheless, the studio’s drawings are fairly distinctive, deviating from the principles of technical drawing, and merging scales, mediums, views and most significantly intent in a single web page. Closely influenced by their time with Enric Miralles, each Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores incorporate a number of elements of a mission in a single drawing. By way of a single blueprint (as they name it) they can observe and report an area by way of time, superimposing totally different surveys, which — particularly of their older tasks akin to Sala Beckett and the Casal Balaguer — immediately inform the design. Moreover, of their later work, collaborative tasks akin to Edificio 111, required a distinct kind of superimposition, the place the blueprint acted as a container and testing of concepts, incorporating numerous opinions and experience, becoming each contribution onto the web page.
Flores & Prats’ current exhibition as a part of La Biennale di Venezia 2023, titled Emotional Heritage and curated by Lesley Lokko, opens up discussions round unfinished drawings, fashions and movies. The exhibition materials was organized on 4 tables: ‘The open situation of the smash;’ ‘The best to inherit;’ ‘Drawing with time;’ and ‘The worth of use,’ which look into reminiscences, civil and ethical values and tales that reside inside deserted buildings and reveal the invisible social relationships that function inside them. As soon as once more, hand drawing is essential on this course of, recording the buildings’ temporal dimensions, the spatiality of ruins, the buildup of cultural parts (doorframes, home windows, tiles, scrapes of plaster) and, lastly, the pressures of possession.
I’m conscious that I’ve barely scratched the floor on the studio’s strategies and processes. Nonetheless, one factor is abundantly clear: all of it begins with a desk. For Flores & Prats, the desk turns into a floor for interplay, collaboration and inquiry, the place drawings that describe a lot greater than the shape and the development of a constructing can happen. A spot, the place time slows down and tasks develop past the given timelines and calls for of the task. Regardless that it isn’t simple to disregard the pressures and calls for of the modern architectural discipline, the Flores & Prats studio has confirmed the advantages of testing out extra and producing much less for the constructed atmosphere, taking the time to actually discover the makings of inhabited house.
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Featured Picture: ARCH.structure, FLORESPRATS-SALABECKETT-62408-PH 04 Previous and new window connecting the Bar with the Vestibule photoAdriàGoula, CC BY-SA 4.0
