Flores & Prats Stage Their Archive as Architecture in a Converted Brick Hall

Most architecture exhibitions treat finished buildings as the subject and the gallery as a neutral container. Flores & Prats reverse that equation. In Emotional Heritage, the Barcelona studio fills a raw brick hall with the accumulated residue of their design process: hand drawings pinned to timber easels, cardboard models clustered on long tables, suspended paper installations floating between columns. The result is less a retrospective than a working argument about the way architecture absorbs time, use, and feeling.

What makes the show worth paying attention to is not the individual objects on display but the spatial logic that holds them together. Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores have long been interested in buildings that carry memory, structures whose imperfections register the passage of human life rather than smoothing it away. Here, they extend that obsession to the exhibition format itself, treating the venue's worn brick walls and industrial trusses not as a backdrop but as an active participant in the conversation. The architecture of the exhibition and the architecture being exhibited merge into a single, layered experience.

The Hall as Co-Author

The exhibition occupies a converted brick hall whose weathered facade, arched doorway, and exposed structure provide an immediate material kinship with the kind of buildings Flores & Prats gravitate toward in practice. Double-height spaces framed by brick columns and timber roof trusses create a rhythm that the curators exploit rather than suppress. Display tables and models sit within bays defined by the existing structure, so each grouping reads as a room within a room.

The decision to leave the industrial shell legible, rather than drywalling it into a white cube, is more than an aesthetic preference. It grounds the studio's thesis in physical evidence: here is a building that has already been adapted, already carries the scars and character of previous lives. The exhibition space becomes its own best exhibit.

Drawings as Objects, Not Documents

Architectural drawings in most exhibitions are flattened behind glass, reduced to illustrations of something that exists elsewhere. Flores & Prats refuse that flattening. Drawings are pinned to timber easels, draped over table edges, and suspended from cables between columns. They occupy three dimensions, catching light and casting shadows, behaving more like textiles than technical documents.

The effect is to restore the drawing's status as a physical artifact with its own weight, texture, and history. You can see pencil pressure, erased lines, the folds where a sheet was carried in a bag. These marks are evidence of a thinking process, and by presenting them at body scale rather than behind vitrines, the exhibition insists that design is manual work before it is anything else.

Models and Suspended Creatures

Scattered across long display tables, the studio's models range from precise sectional cutaways to rough massing studies in cardboard. They are grouped not chronologically but associatively, inviting visitors to trace material and spatial ideas across different projects. A model of a rehabilitation sits next to a model of a new build; what links them is a shared attitude toward threshold, texture, or light.

Overhead, a suspended orange paper dragon sculpture adds a note of exuberance that cuts through any risk of reverence. It is a reminder that Flores & Prats treat architecture as a place for play and narrative, not only for tectonic rigor. The arched windows and black metal staircase of the hall frame these displays with an almost theatrical depth, layering foreground objects against deep perspectival views.

Overhead and Below: Two Ways of Reading the Room

Seen from above, the exhibition reveals a second order of composition. Drawings suspended between brick columns create a translucent canopy that visitors walk beneath, their bodies momentarily silhouetted against the paper surfaces. The overhead view also exposes the careful spacing of tables and easels, a layout that choreographs movement without prescribing a single path.

At ground level, the experience is deliberately less legible. You turn a corner around a brick column and encounter a cluster of models you had not anticipated. Industrial lighting throws warm pools across certain tables while leaving others in relative shadow. The curators clearly understand that architecture is apprehended in fragments, and they have designed the exhibition to mirror that perceptual reality.

Light, Brick, and the Texture of Time

Some portions of the hall have been painted white, revealing exposed concrete beams and skylights that wash the space with diffused natural light. Others retain their raw brick finish. The contrast sets up a dialogue between restoration and preservation, between the impulse to refresh and the decision to leave things alone. Flores & Prats navigate that tension in their built work constantly; here, they can stage it in the same room for visitors to compare directly.

Skylights and clerestory windows introduce a temporal dimension: the quality of light changes through the day, shifting how models read and how drawings reveal their layered pencil lines. It is a simple observation, but exhibitions rarely account for it. This one does, and the result is a space that feels alive rather than hermetically sealed.

Why This Project Matters

Architecture exhibitions often struggle with a fundamental problem: buildings are full-body, durational experiences, and galleries are not. Flores & Prats sidestep the trap by treating the exhibition itself as an architectural project, one with thresholds, material contrasts, shifting light, and a plan that rewards wandering. They do not ask you to imagine their buildings; they ask you to inhabit a space that operates by the same principles.

Emotional Heritage also makes a quiet but important case for the hand-drawn, hand-built process at a moment when digital production threatens to erase it entirely. The studio's insistence on showing process rather than product, marks rather than renders, suggests that architecture's emotional charge comes not from formal novelty but from the accumulated evidence of human attention. In a discipline increasingly anxious about its relevance, that is a message worth hearing.

Emotional Heritage: Exploring Architecture and Memory with Flores & Prats. Studio: Flores & Prats. Photography by Adrià Goula and Eva Prats.

About the Studio

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