Building Communities. Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats

Activity

The architect's desk 5

Library

General public, Professionals

30 May 2019

Since 2015, MACA has proposed meetings in a conversation format, centered on art and architecture. Reflecting again

on the relationships between architecture and art, understanding the process of construction and reconstruction of architecture from a more artistic or philosophical point of view, leads us to delve deeper into this proposal. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays

of each month, from September 2018 to May 2019. Eva Prats is an Architect from the ETSA of Barcelona and Doctor Architect from RMIT Melbourne. Ricardo Flores is an architect from FADU-UBA, Master's in Urban Planning and Doctor Architect from ETSAB-UPC. Eva and Ricardo founded Flores & Prats in Barcelona in 1998, a studio dedicated to the confrontation of theory and academic practice with design and constructive activity.

They have worked on rehabilitation projects of disused structures, in the design of urban public spaces with neighborhood participation, and in social housing and its capacity to create community. But the studio has also experimented with the use of films to document projects or edible architecture menus developed for exhibitions of their work in Barcelona, Copenhagen, or Venice.

The work of Flores & Prats has obtained, among other recognitions, the Grand Award in Architecture from the Royal Academy of Arts in London 2009, the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2016, the Premi Ciutat de Palma 2017, the AD Architects of the Year Award 2018, and the AR New into Old Award 2019. They have been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize on various occasions and their work has been exhibited in the last four editions of the Venice Architecture Biennial. In addition to their professional practice, Eva and Ricardo are actively involved in the academic world.

They are Professors of Projects at the ETSA of Barcelona, Professors of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT Melbourne, and between 2019 and 2021 visiting professors at ETH Zurich. In the 2022-2023 academic year they will begin as visiting professors at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio. In 2014, the Mexican publisher Arquine published the first monograph on their work, Pensado a mano. La Arquitectura de Flores & Prats, and in 2017 the new magazine Archives dedicated its first issue to the studio's work. In 2020, Arquine and the Barcelona City Council published the monographic book Sala Beckett. International Center for Dramaturgy. In 2021, the Archives Universum magazine dedicated its first issue to the studio's private world and working methods.

Information

Opening hours: 7:00 PM
Duration: 90 minutes
Type of activity: Design and Architecture
Modality: At the museum

Related activities

Program to which it belongs

The architecture table

General public ... , 29.01.2015 - 17.12.2026

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante whose collections are formed by works created fundamentally in the twentieth century. They range from the so-called avant-gardes to all the approaches and artistic manifestations that took place in the decades of the second half of the past century. They are expressed on different supports and materials, with diverse dimensions and techniques. In turn, the temporary exhibitions are related to these collections and allow for expanding or deepening some aspects of contemporary chronology. However, contemporary architecture is absent from both the permanent collections and those temporary manifestations.The architecture of the MACA itself, a project created and directed by the Sancho Madridejos Studio, is a beautiful building of great functional efficiency. The syncopated projection of horizontal and vertical spaces establishes a formal order based on the geometry and texture of the materials used in construction, while revealing a kind of tension resolved by the overhead passage of light, a kind of "felt" spirituality more emotional than real.The MACA proposes in a conversational format, meetings around art and architecture around the architect's table. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays of each month, from January to May 2015.This first cycle will consist of different manifestations. The first and fundamental one will show works by an architect related through his vital and professional activity to the province of Alicante. The selection criterion will be conditioned by the modernity of the proposals, understanding that modernity, first of all, in a chronological sense, attending to those architectures and architects who were protagonists and participants in the advent of contemporaneity. The exhibition of some models will allow for offering three-dimensional models, reclaiming the model as such, as the authors of the Renaissance defended. And to illustrate the complete work process, sketches and preliminary drawings will be shown alongside the project plans and notes developed during the construction process. All of this with the ultimate aim of understanding and grasping in some way the constructed space.The architect's table, a table from 1912, real and present (deposited in the MACA by its owner Alfonso Navarro Guzmán), serves as an ideological foundation to link the exhibitions and will serve as the material support for the models so that we can traverse, while dreaming, the imagined space.

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