Flores & Prats Inventory the Building Before They Change It

The inventory comes before the plan

When Flores & Prats won the 2011 competition to turn a derelict workers' cooperative in Barcelona's Poblenou district into the Sala Beckett theatre and drama centre, they did not begin by drawing a new building. They began by cataloguing the old one. Over roughly six months the studio — founded in 1998 by Eva Prats, born in Barcelona in 1965, and Ricardo Flores, born in Buenos Aires the same year, both formed in the office of Enric Miralles — produced more than a hundred large-format survey drawings of the abandoned 1920s structure. Every door, window, ceramic floor tile, light fitting and plaster rosette was measured, drawn at scale and pinned to a plan that recorded exactly where it stood. They then built each element again in balsa wood at small scale. Only when the disused cooperative existed twice more, once on paper and once in miniature, did the design of the theatre actually start.

That order of operations is the studio's real contribution, and it is a method rather than a style. Where most renovations treat the survey as a formality to get through, here it is the generative act — the thing that produces the design instead of merely preceding it.

Re-siting, not preserving

Most adaptive reuse keeps a building's outer shell and inserts a new interior behind it — facadism, in the unkind term. Flores & Prats do something different: they treat the elements they inventory as a kit of parts that can be lifted, moved and given a new job elsewhere in the same building. At Sala Beckett the nineteenth-century hydraulic cement floor tiles that had paved the cooperative's upper social hall were taken up and relaid downstairs in the ground-floor café, arranged in a fresh pattern that curls around the new curved bar. Polychrome ceramic tiles salvaged from various rooms were recomposed into a carpet-like floor stitching the public spaces together. Old timber doors with coloured glass were reset as partitions and openings. Because the recomposed tile floor followed a curving geometry no catalogue could supply, the architects drew it at full 1:1 scale so the tilers on site had a template to lay against.

The result reads as continuous with the old cooperative not because a facade was frozen but because the actual substance of the place — its floors, its doors, its light — was kept in circulation and put back to work. The building remembers itself through its own materials rather than through a photograph of a preserved front.

Drawing as thinking, slowness as method

None of this is possible at the speed of standard practice, and that is deliberate. Prats and Flores work by hand, on paper, layering sheet after sheet of vellum and redrawing as they think. They describe the analogue process as valuable precisely because it is slow: abandoning the instant precision that software demands leaves room for imagination and for uncertainty, and lets the hand wander across several ideas instead of prematurely resolving one. Drawing, for them, is not the record of a decision already made but the means of arriving at it. The hundred survey drawings of the Beckett were not documentation produced after understanding — they were how understanding was produced.

In interviews the two have compared their projects to detective stories: the building is interrogated for clues, and the design follows the evidence the survey turns up rather than a preconceived image imposed from outside. They have argued for an architecture that values the time already invested and accumulated in a place, and treats that accumulated time as a virtue rather than a defect to be scrubbed away. It is a quiet inversion of the renovation industry's usual reflex, which is to strip a building back to a blank shell and start clean.

What the method produces

The pay-off is buildings that feel neither museum-preserved nor gutted-and-flipped. Sala Beckett, completed in 2016 and named winner of the Architectural Review's New into Old award in 2019, is full of doorways that do not quite align, patched floors and rooms whose proportions still carry the memory of their former life as a bar, a gym and meeting halls. The imperfection is the point: it is the trace of a real building that was read closely rather than erased. The same patient survey-and-recompose approach shaped the studio's earlier restoration of the Casal Balaguer cultural centre in Palma de Mallorca, and it runs through their social housing and neighbourhood public-space work, much of it developed with resident participation.

For anyone weighing how to handle an old building, the lesson travels well beyond Barcelona. The decisive move is not choosing which features to save and which to demolish, but changing the order of work: survey and understand the existing fabric in exhaustive detail first, as a designed act in its own right, and let the new program be assembled from what is already there. A found tile, a salvaged door, a worn stair is not an obstacle to the design — under this method it is the design's raw material. Flores & Prats hand over not a signature look that can be copied but a way of seeing an old building as an archive to be re-read, and a discipline slow enough to actually read it.