Flores & Prats

An approach to architecture

A profile of Flores & Prats through Sala Beckett and Casal Balaguer, examining observation, reuse and the transition from inherited rooms to public life.

Source-based editorial supplied by Dots; published on 1 October 2026 without an independent original-source recheck by Codex. Chinese sections are summaries. Source limitations: Sala Beckett opening in November 2016 is distinguished from official construction period September 2014–May 2017. Casal Balaguer is explicitly credited as a collaboration with Duch–Pizá.

Observation connected to building

Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats established their Barcelona studio in 1998. Their official profile describes research linked to construction, with work spanning reuse, housing and public space. The relationship is especially clear in projects that begin with an existing building. Drawing and close observation help the architects identify qualities that a programme or condition survey might overlook: the proportion of a room, a worn surface or the route between spaces. The subsequent design can then engage those qualities while introducing new uses. Official studio profile.

Sala Beckett and neighbourhood recognition

The new Sala Beckett occupies the former Pau i Justícia workers' cooperative in Barcelona's Poblenou district and opened in November 2016. Its earlier rooms contained decorative floors, coloured glazing and traces of social gatherings. Flores & Prats treated this material inheritance as part of the theatre's new setting. Performance and teaching spaces, offices and a bar-restaurant bring different patterns of occupation into the building. The architectural question extends beyond the survival of individual details: how can a changed institution remain recognisable within a neighbourhood's memory? The project makes that question tangible through the spaces people enter and use. Official Sala Beckett project account.

A palace acquires another phase

At Casal Balaguer in Palma de Mallorca, Flores & Prats worked with Duch–Pizá to adapt a historic palace as a cultural centre, including exhibition, concert and workshop uses. The project account describes an extended process of sketching and an approach that regards the intervention as another phase in the building's development. This reading allows inherited rooms and new connections to form a continuing spatial sequence. It also makes authorship cumulative: the present design joins the work of earlier builders and occupants, as well as that of the named contemporary collaborators. Official Casal Balaguer account and credits.

Reading change in the details

These projects encourage a close comparison of what was found and what was altered. An irregular junction can reveal how a new route meets an old room; a retained finish can carry evidence of prior occupation into a different programme. The practice's interest in films and other forms of documentation, described in its studio profile, also points toward architecture as an experience unfolding through time. The strongest reading of this work follows that temporal dimension while staying specific about what each intervention enables. Memory becomes architecturally useful when it participates in circulation, occupation and shared access, giving a building's accumulated character a role in its next public life. Studio research approach.

Explore the GAD index

For a further reading of architectural history carried into a new phase of use, explore Neues Museum Restoration.