Flores & Prats: Sala Beckett

Flores & Prats: Sala Beckett: International Drama Centre

The Workers Cooperative Pau i Justícia in Poblenou, very active for much of the twentieth century, closed its doors in the late 1990s and left the building abandoned and in an advanced state of ruin.

The Sala Beckett, one of the driving forces of Catalan theatre since its foundation in the late 1980s as the headquarters of the company El Teatro Fronterizo of José Sanchis Sinisterra, and directed by Toni Casares since 1997, was left without its headquarters in the neighbourhood of Gràcia, in the mid-2000s.

Following a public competition in 2011, the Sala Beckett team and Flores & Prats studio undertook a process of rehabilitation of this former Workers Cooperative to convert it into the new Sala Beckett / International Drama Centre. The building, abandoned for more than twenty years, was still very present in the memory of the neighbours living around it, so, this became the recovery of social heritage as well as physical heritage. The final result captures the era of the Cooperative, the era of abandonment, and the era of the new Sala Beckett.

Ricardo Flores studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Buenos Aires FADU-UBA, graduating in 1992 ... from 1993 to 1998, collaborated as Design Architect at Arch. Enric Miralles’ office ... in 1998 established in Barcelona the office of architecture Flores & Prats Archs, with Eva Prats, who studied architecture at the ETSAB, Barcelona School of Architecture, graduating in 1992 ... collaborated as Design Architect at Arch. Enric Miralles’ office, from 1991 to 1994 ... in 1998 established in Barcelona the office of architecture Flores & Prats Archs, with Ricardo Flores.

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One of the highlights of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale was Liquid Light, Flores & Prat's presentation of their design for Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Occupying a portion of the impressive Corderie space at the Arsenale, the two-sided presentation provided a full-size mockup of a portion of the project along the walkway and, on the flip side, a back-of-house area with sketches, drawings, photographs, and study models. (The latter can be seen in my photograph from the Biennale's vernissage, when I happened to capture Flores talking with a journalist.) While I didn't think of it at the time, the abundance of materials for a relatively diminutive project (3,000 m2 with a budget of 2.5 mil euros) certainly pointed to the potential for a book-length document to be produced. Two years later it has arrived, and it is impressive — as much as the exhibition and the Sala Beckett itself.

Sala Beckett is the transformation of the old Cooperativa Paz y Justicia in Barcelona's Poblenou neighborhood into a home for the theater group named for Samuel Beckett. Flores & Prats won the design competition in 2011 and five years later the building opened to the public. Where before the two-story building housed a gymnasium, pool, cafe, theater, classrooms, and other spaces tailored to the worker's cooperative, the Sala Becket features a bar, two theaters, classrooms, offices, and related spaces for learning, practicing, and performing. Some of these before-and-after functions overlap, but for the most part the new uses depart considerably from what was there before and therefore required a good amount of demolition in order to reconfigure the interior. Yet somehow, as captured in completed photographs, it looks like nothing was done to the building. The book's 304 pages explain just how this impression came to be.

The book starts with the essay "How should the New Sala Beckett be? An important decision" by Toni Casares, director of Sala Beckettt, and features texts by architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, as well as contributions from Juan José Lahuerta, Soraya Smithson, Sergi Belbel, Carlota Coloma and Adrià Lahuerta, Manuel Guerrero Brullet, and Ellis Woodman. But really it's a book about the visuals: the finished photographs, construction photos, drawings, models, sketches, and other images revealing the design and realization of the project. (The architects' online book presentation from June gives a great peek inside the book, while also allowing them to share some of the models and other artifacts in their office.) Of course, the images don't stand alone; they are accompanied by informative captions that aid greatly in telling the story of Sala Beckett's new home. But the book is just one means for Flores & Prats to tell that story, one on equal footing with the Biennale intervention and the five-part documentary series Escala 1:5 (both are discussed at length in the book).

Photographs of the completed Sala Beckett reveal layers of new and old but also an uncertainty as to where one era ends and one begins. The architects' meticulous cataloging of all of the existing building's elements — windows, doors, floor tiles, fixtures, decorations, etc. — informed their decision to treat the design as, in part, a recomposition of the original. There are certainly new elements, as well as new cuts into the building for natural light and enlarging spaces; and not all of the old materials were retained. But the overall feeling is one of respect: for the original, for the theater group, and for the architects' ability in adapting the former for the latter. With this book I feel like I know Sala Beckett intimately, even more so than buildings I've visited. As with any good building monograph, this one really makes me want to go see it in person.

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