‘You leave the pages open near where you are drawing and it is very inspiring’: Flores & Prats’ AR Bookshelf

The AR Bookshelf is a podcast by The Architectural Review. The idea is very simple: we ask each guest to put books on an imaginary bookshelf and tell us their story.

Flores & Prats take the AR around their bookshelf, from Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier to TS Eliot and Georges Perec. On the way, we discuss the death of drawing, books that hold memory, and bringing buildings back to life.

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Based in Barcelona and formed in 1998, the pair are best known for Sala Beckett, a theatre carefully choreographed within the shell of an old co-operative social club. Time and slowness is something of a theme their work: the Casal Balaguer house museum in Palma de Mallorca designed with Duch-Pizà Arquitectes took 20 years to come to fruition. Most recently, the pair won the competition with Ouest Architecture to reimagine the Ancien Théâtre des Variétés in Brussels. They are no strangers to bookmaking either, editing and writing publications about John Hejduk, the spaces of Dutch painting, and Pompeii as well as their own work.

Flores & Prats AR Bookshelf bibliography:

Louis I Kahn: Complete Work 1935-1974, Heinz Ronner and Sharad Jhaveri, 1987
Le Corbusier: Complete Works,  Willy Boesiger, 1965
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from The Sacred Wood, TS Eliot, 1920
A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord, 1965
Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, 1972
Thought By Hand, Flores & Prats, 2014
La vie mode d’emploi, Georges Perec, 1978
Mafalda 1 to 10, Quino, 1966-1974

The book you have open on your drawing board:

Louis I Kahn: Complete Work 1935-1974, Heinz Ronner and Sharad Jhaveri, 1987

This is not a book that shows the final result, but rather the intermediate moments of Louis Kahn’s research. This open material makes it easier to enter and participate in the doubts, the uncertainty of the process of developing a project, finding affinities between what we see in the book and what we have on the drawing board.

The book you would give to an architecture student:

Le Corbusier: Complete Works,  Willy Boesiger, 1965

For both of us, Le Corbusier was an enormous help during our studies: the pages, which seem waxed; the drawings of the projects, so well articulated; the photographs of their houses with the old cars parked at the door; the design with so much white air … When you open any of the eight volumes, the rhythm in the room changes. The clarity and synthesis in his projects makes him an attractive author to learn from. At the same time, he worked through so many different fields in his life that, when looking for someone to help with a specific problem, one has the feeling that Le Corbusier has surely worked on it.

The book that has helped you to understand time and history:

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from The Sacred Wood, TS Eliot, 1920

Eliot states that tradition cannot be inherited: that if one wants it, one has to obtain it through great labour, building it with one’s own experience. He also states that to build one’s tradition implies historical sense, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal together, is what creates tradition, and makes the artist conscious of their place in time, of their contemporaneity. We identify with this definition of the timeless condition in our work, which resonates with our approach to a kind of work without differentiations of the time of each place, working with history and contemporaneity at the time, without distances.

The book you reread and reread:

A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord, 1965

This is a really nice little book to read; you can read it in a day or two. The book describes the story of when Lord the author accepts Giacometti’s invitation to sit for him for a portrait, oil on canvas. It was supposed to be one day’s work, but it ended up taking 18 days, and the process is ongoing. Lord records these sittings, and what interests us is the way the book makes evident many things that normally cannot be seen: the process of creation itself. It is interesting for us to read about other people’s creative process, how they feel or suffer or get along with the problems and how they face them – to feel that one is not alone and that many different people in different times have passed through the same things that we are passing through now.

The book whose cover you would have on your wall:

Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, 1972

The pamphleteer and propagandist character of this book is represented on the cover. It is already saying from the cover that it is going to discuss the graphic character of the city.

Thought By Hand, Flores & Prats, 2014

The front cover of our book Thought By Hand  is a drawing by one of our collaborators. This drawing also became a pen box made by a carpenter for Ricardo for his birthday.

The one book you would take with you into quarantine:

La vie mode d’emploi, Georges Perec, 1978

Perec imagines a building in Paris whose facade has been eliminated, so every room of the building is visible simultaneously. The rooms and the activities taking place in them are uncovered. It is a double exercise of imagination and of inventory at the same time, and we are frequently reminded of this in the situation we are in now, closed in at home, when neighbours in the building become much more present… at least in our imagination.

The five books you would save from the bonfire:

Ricardo Flores: Mafalda 1 to 10, Quino, 1966-1974

I have read them since I was a child, and for me it is a connection to humour and common sense. I know almost all the vignettes by heart, and they often, at certain moments of the day, come to mind and make me smile. I admire the way the drawings express the feelings of the characters and connect so perfectly with our reactions and way of thinking about life.

Eva Prats: five books from my grandfather’s collection, which are more like objects, holding memories

Bonus material

The books that didn’t fit into the podcast

The last book you read:

Antoni Gaudí: Ornament, Fire and Ashes, Juan José Lahuerta, 2016

In this book, the work of Antoni Gaudí is placed in relation to the industrialisation and politics of his time. Starting with the study of some details in Gaudí’s work, the text describes the historical context as echoed in the architect’s work. Gaudí has been treated these last decades as a genius out of his time, as something without any logical explanation, as pure art, or pure caprice. This book gives evidence to the contrary, and brings more richness to the value and accomplishment of this architect’s work.

Les aventures de Tintin: Objectif Lune (1953) and On a marché sur la Lune (1954), Hergé

Now that we are working in Brussels with our new project, the rehabilitation of the ancient Théâtre des Variétés, we have returned to our studies of French, as this is the language of the clients, collaborators and engineers in Brussels. So, besides the classes we take periodically, and watching French movies almost every day, we read Belgian authors, like Hergé and his character Tintin, to practise the language as well. These two adventures on the trip to the Moon are really fabulous, and contain a lot of text.

The book you wish you’d written:

Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti, 1960.

We would like to be as clear as Canetti when describing a project. In Canetti’s book, each sentence adds little by little to a clear description of our behaviour when acting as a crowd. He describes the meeting of a multitude of people inside a stadium as a sequence of very concise observations of the movement of the people towards the arena, ending with everyone with their back to the city.

The book you ought to have read but haven’t:

Mechanization Takes Command, Sigfried Giedion, 1948

I started reading it some years ago; these days it would be good to go through it again and finish it, as I am more and more concerned about how industrialisation has informed our way of thinking, our creativity and values. I am thinking about going back to this book to start thinking about a culture outside an industrialised system.

The book that reminds of you of Sala Beckett:

Je me souviens, Georges Perec. Hachette, 1978

Perec lists all the things he does not want to forget, a kind of inventory of his past. This inventory is not generic but specific. He identifies the multiple qualities of his memories and describes them with care and precision: time, materiality, light or even smells. We remembered this book after elaborating the detailed inventory of all that we found at the old Cooperative Pau i Justícia in Barcelona, which subsequently became the new Sala Beckett. When starting our work there, we realised that all that was in front of our eyes could vanish soon, as the state of the building was so fragile, and therefore we figured out a way of collecting all that had survived of the ruin and was able to be reused. This inventory of all that can still be remembered – and keeping it alive – is a similar exercise to that of Georges Perec.

The book you are reading right now:

Six Drawing Lessons, William Kentridge, 2018.

Kentridge is an author whose work we have been observing for quite a while, admiring his capacity to make visible his creative process through drawing material and film making, two activities we have used to show our work as well. The way Kentridge uses these techniques of representation, which seem to capture the intermediate state of things in his mind, brings us close to his world of interests and obsessions and allows us to share them.

The book you would take on a journey:

Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuściński, 2008

Travels with Herodotus records how Kapuściński set out on his first forays – to India, China and Africa – with the great Greek historian constantly in his pocket. At every encounter with a new culture, Kapuściński plunges in, curious and observant, thirsting to understand its history, its thought, its people. And he reads Herodotus so much that he often feels he is embarking on two journeys – the first his assignment as a reporter, the second following Herodotus’s expeditions. The way in which Kapuściński gets to work, not staying in his hotel but getting very close to the reality he is studying, seems to us a very familiar way of working, as we like to get very near to the people and things we are working with.

The book you can get lost in:

À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust, 1913

Proust captures slow and still time. One has the sensation of being in a suspended, continuous time. Moving forwards and backwards in a double and parallel action, the book is like drawing, mixing memories with the reality in front of us, between creating and observing.