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or felt—in terms of gravity, of massiveness, of visual continuity. Therefore, it could not be more disconcerting than to sud-denly discover that everything is all held up on a thin plank and a few rough trestles. The Michelangelo church, consid-ered—and felt, I repeat—as a type of tectonic celebration, nevertheless lacks foundations, and not even any ground on which to rest; there it is, sitting atop an enormous tray, levitating in the air. This tragicomic contrast says much, retroactively, about the necessary uselessness of Michelangelo’s efforts, at once a titan, gymnast and funambulist… but that is not the topic of our current discussion. We are only concerned with the evidence that, between the model and the mechanism used to exhibit that rustic table, a cut is produced, a cruel metaphor of another one: the apparently uncrossable divide between the plan and its materialization. And so, the legs upon which Casal Balaguer’s model sits, which I have described above as props and which are in fact an interpretation of a workshop trestle—like the one we can see in Lemercier’s engraving—those props, I repeat, tell us the exact opposite. They refer to the perfect continuity which, in the work of Flores & Prats, exists between the project (let’s call it a “process”) and the material world. Apart from the continuity of materials, techniques, concepts… the way in which these props are splayed is reminiscent of an intricate branch-like arrangement. The model therefore evokes the highest order of dreams, in every sense of the word “living”: the tree house. Far up above dangers, among the birds and the fruit, near the sky, swayed by the wind, this house, a cabin that is both secured and in flight at the same time, is the symbol of a safe house, happily nested in the branches. The fact that amid the tangle of legs-cum-foliage Flores & Prats and their collaborators have placed a small bracket, upon which another (smaller scale) model of the same buildings is placed, not only highlights the imaginative powers of the miniature, but shows us, through the growth of the branches, the expansion of the project itself, the fruits at their different stages of maturation, in a demonstration of the mas-tery that again refers to the specific making as an almost organic process, far removed from any utopian ideal. The humor-ous effect of these small, growing houses, which remind me of Duchamp’s dollhouses, full of authentic miniature works of art, ultimately does away with any ostentation, despite the fact that what is on display here is by no means small. Indeed, boxes have been built for these models in such a way that they can travel—by boat or by plane in the case of Casal Balaguer—to the site, where the boxes open up and the models rise up and unfold, as if in a practical demonstration of the true scale-related problems, of the true perception of relative size, of the large and small, of the near and far. At other times, all of the project’s models have been gathered together into a kind of time capsule, the opening of which means seeing the whole process again, only this time influenced by a specific item: locks, buckles, straps, hinges… The capsule now refers back to its own, simple and perfect mechanisms, and to the hands that manipulate it. The model in the capsule, the capsule in the studio…: the making, finally, ends up expressing itself in the perfect continuity of that which, containing itself succes-sively, contains everything at the same time, each time.

*

All of these issues have a long history. In fact, Flores & Prats’s oldest work published in their book contains them all. Eva Prats received the commission to transform a small roof-top construction on top of a former laundry building in Barcelona’s Ensanche district into a mini-apartment to be a pied-à-terre in Barcelona for its owners from the island of Mallorca: a single room, without outside views, lit up through a skylight with aquarium lighting, and containing two wooden boxes. From the entrance to the apartment—a raised platform—you immediately sense in the small space, dominating it from above, the relative size of the two boxes, the smaller of the two in front of us, the larger one to the left, and, in a stereoscopic exercise, we imagine the possibility of one fitting inside the other: could this not be, finally, the last step? Or the last pase? The mini apartment, in fact, does have something of magical box about it: lids and doors that open up and slide across, furniture coming out of furniture, pull-out beds. Everything is articulated around the concrete security offered by the miniature and the resource, something I have already mentioned on multiple occasions. But there is more: this type of rejoicing of the box’s precision, which we open up with the certainty of finding something familiar within it, this intuition of the inalienable in the hiding place, is a reaction to the conviction that architecture is capable of generating the most essential feelings of security: the feeling of possession, intimacy, interior. The work of Flores & Prats has this deep feeling of decorum: architec-ture’s mission—faithful to the touch, displaying itself with the need, full of certainty—is to provide this sense of security. This mini-apartment, this simple pied-à-terre, is akin to the essential cabin. It is the refuge that has everything; the living nucleus. Flores & Prats compare this room with one of those old travel cases: those by Innovation, Le Corbusier’s favorite, or, even better, those made by Louis Vuitton, their great inventor. It is clear that opening one of these trunks and seeing coat hangers and rails fan out, little drawers of every conceivable size for all kinds of clothes, one within the other, the highest for hats and

Cupboard containing test models for the Casal Balaguer project in Palma de Mallorca. Flores & Prats Studio, Barcelona.Photograph: Adrià Goula

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The garden is the transformation of a section of land lifted 20 meters into the air. This displacement causes it to lose weight and gain air. The new ground is a wooden surface and the amount of soil carried up there is only that needed to fill containers and plant pots. A metal structure supports this new ground level, resting on the partition walls and evening out the small differences in height between roof terraces.

The project proposes the reuse of a vacant space with a dual purpose: firstly, to construct a garden and its structure of planters and walkways across the rooftops, in order to be able to walk around the full breadth of the city block, as if in a cloister; secondly, for the leisure activities of local residents and the practice of the horticultural college students who will look after the garden.

Roof Gardens in the Ensanche District Barcelona, 1992

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The characteristics of Barcelona’s rooftops are suitable for a garden. Up there, the order of the city becomes a broad, near horizon, there is a vast quantity of surface area available, plenty of sun, the city’s noise is diminished…The garden organizes the use of a forgotten site, building the possibility of a new community the size of a city block in the Ensanche district. This shared space created on the rooftops puts each home in contact with a larger number of neighbors, with the intention of building an intermediate community between that of the home and that of the city as a whole.The concerns of this graduation project have reappeared in the work of the studio: reading in the possibilities of today’s city what its future might be; the intensification of what already exists, rather than creating something wholly new; the concern with recycling; introducing greenery into a dense, solidified city, with elevated landscapes on pergolas or roof terraces; identifying a community and helping with its construction....

TEXTS BY

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Yutes company in Barcelona and the Vitali company in Milan, without whom this book would not have been possi-ble. Their faith in our studio to design their headquarters continues with their support for publication of this book

Our thanks also to the photographers we have worked with over the years, who have generously allowed us to use their images: Giovanni Zanzi, Esther Rovira, Hisao Suzuki, Duccio Malagamba, Adrià Goula, César Lucadamo, José Hevia, Àlex García and Filippo Romano.

To Oriol Valls for having prepared this book with such care and to the Arquine editorial team for treating it with such understanding and pro-fessionalism.

And to Miquel Adrià, per aquest primer vol.

Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats

Thought By HandThe Architecture of Flores & PratsFirst edition, 2014

© 2014 Arquine S.A. de C.V.Culiacán 123, AnexoColonia HipódromoMéxico D.F. 06170ISBN: 978-607-7784-74-6

Cover Cabinet for fountain pens Benedikte Mikkelsen

Texts © Miquel Adrià© Manuel Arguijo© Toni Casares© Ricardo Flores © Adrià Goula© Juan José Lahuerta© Eva Prats© Manuel de Solà-Morales© Soraya Smithson

Visual materialThe drawings, models, photographs of works and collages that appear in this book are documents produced and archived in the studio of Flores & Prats Arquitectes.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of the copyright holders and the publishers.

DirectorMiquel Adrià

Editorial DirectorIsabel Garcés

Concept and Original DesignFlores & Prats Arquitectes

Editorial CoordinationSelene Patlan (Arquine)Oriol Valls (Flores & Prats)

Design SettingSamuel Morales

Translations and Copy Editing Fionn PetchQuentin Pope

www.arquine.com

Thought by HandThe Architecture of Flores & Prats

Printed in September 2014 by Everbest Printing Co. Ltd., China. Texts were set using the Swiss typeface family. 2,000 copies were printed.

MiquEl ADRià

JuAn JOSé lAHuERTA

RiCARDO FlORES, EVA PRATS

ADRià gOulA

JOAn EnRiC PRATS, CESC SEguRA / YuTES

MAnuEl DE SOlà-MORAlES

MAnuEl ARguiJO

CARlOTA COlOMA, ADRià lAHuERTA / 15-l FilMS

SORAYA SMiTHSOn

MiRAlDA

TOni CASARES

Reference points for this project included the Ramblas of the city, a promenade between ever-renewed planters of flowers; the city’s cloisters, with their tranquil circulation, and the Ciudadela fountain, a walkway with changing heights in relation to the trees.

THOugHT BY HAnDTHE ARCHiTECTuRE OF FlORES & PRATS

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3 Roof Gardens in the Ensanche District Barcelona, 1992

9

11

28

34 Affinities

42 Fabra & Coats Gardens Sant Andreu, Barcelona, 1997-1999

72 Museum of the Mills Es Jonquet, Palma de Mallorca, 1998-2002

81

86

97 Casal Balaguer Palma de Mallorca, 1996-2014

138

140

143 Providencia House 176 Badalona, Barcelona, 2002-2008 301

146

166 Through the Canvas Sydney, Australia, 2004

169

172

174

184

185 Plaza Pio XII Sant Adrià del Besòs, Barcelona, 2002-2005

186

227 Campus Microsoft Italia Peschiera Borromeo, Milan, 2007-2011

252 Bornholms Museum Competition Rønne, Denmark, 2003

266 Yutes Warehouse Sant Just Desvern, Barcelona, 2000-2005

272

282

287 Mireia Jewelry Cabinet Barcelona, Summer 2004

CONTENTS An Extraordinary Case

Miquel Adrià

Anti-IconsOn the Work of Flores & Prats

Juan José Lahuerta

Process In Full ViewRicardo Flores, Eva Prats

(Not) Drawing on Site

Liquid Light

Drawing without Erasing

A Photographic FeastAdrià Goula

The Discipline of the Existing

De Hooch’s Rooms

In Front and Behind

The Value of the Studio

Participation

“Mi plaza y yo” Anatxu Zabalbeascoa

Yutes Warehouse Joan Enric Prats, Francesc Segura

“Pliegues y dobleces”Inteview for SAM, Basel

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The Social Dimension of Housing

Torresana Project in TerrassaManuel de Solà-Morales

The Static of 111Manuel Arguijo

”Seguir en contacto después de la obra”Interview in Clarín newspaper

Carlota Coloma, Adrià Lahuerta / 15-L Films

Danish PastriesSoraya Smithson

A StorefrontSoraya Smithson

Edible Architecture with Escribà

Fiesta Anual RitualMiralda / FoodCultura

Reading of an Extract from a PlayToni Casares / Sala Beckett

Toni Casares

Ruins

303 Mueble Joyero Mireia

292 Portable Memories Exhibition Sala Vinçon, Barcelona, 2013

293 Graduation Project Universidad Internacional de Cataluña, 2010-2012

304 House in a Suitcase Barcelona, 1994

311 Building 111 355 Terrassa, Barcelona, 2004-2011

345

350 Plaza Nicaragua Montcada i Reixac, Barcelona, 2005-2006

364

375

379 Crossed Gazes, 111 Building (Exhibition) COAC, Barcelona, 2011

384 Meeting at the Building (Exhibition) Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2013

388 Post-occupation Workshop 21st Century Housing Master’s Program at UPC, Barcelona, 2012

390

391 Meeting at the Building (Film) Edificio 111, Terrassa, Barcelona, 2012

392 Catalogue for a Double Exhibition Copenhagen, 2013

393

394 Ingredients & Cakes (Exhibition) Leth & Gori, Copenhagen, 2013

395

398

402 Crossed Gazes, 111 Building (Debate) COAC, Barcelona, 2011

404

405

406 New Sala Beckett Poblenou, Barcelona, 2011- 408

436 List of Projects

438 Website www.floresprats.com Flores&Prats, Barcelona, 2006

440 Archive

449 Biography

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An Extraordinary CaseMiquel Adrià

For Flores & Prats everything is more. Every element has an effect, setting off one or several reactions. No hierarchy of scale makes the whole more important than the specifics; large volumes do not overshadow fine details: everything is relevant. Just as a group of jarocho folk singers can string together a song from nuggets of information, or an ar-chaeologist can use a section of jawbone to recreate a face, an expression and the color of skin, Flores & Prats are able to extract a new discourse from the frame of an ordinary, dilapidated old window, making it into the frame of one of Hogwarts’ talking pictures. Flores & Prats love to wield the magic wand of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, which trans-forms pumpkins and mice into carriages and pageboys. As heirs to Miralles, alchemy is in their blood. Some of their anointed confreres carried on doing circus tricks, while others became simple chroniclers of the feats they witnessed or were told about; Flores & Prats, meanwhile, continued working in their own laboratory to assemble their own world of smoke and bubbles. According to legend, Enric Miralles continued drawing a project even after the building was completed. Something similar happens in Flores & Prats’s work, insofar as the project has no beginning or end, but is instead a continuous storyline that connects one project to the next, threading together themes, programs, scales and anecdotes. Their projects are stories. I remember a recent remark by Antonio Ortiz—one of those two Antonios (Cruz & Ortiz) who have embodied Spanish architecture for the past thirty years—in which he referred to the city as a story, and that individual works of architecture had no reason to say anything, otherwise they would turn the city into a cacophony of noise and decoration. For Ortiz, architecture needed to be hermetic and to respond to its own laws of composition, ignoring its impact on the context. The city would tell the stories, structured around a collection of inscrutable objects cre-ated on its streets. Clearly Antonio Ortiz was not thinking here about the architecture of Flores & Prats but his own work, or that of O. M. Ungers or Richard Rogers. Meanwhile I was imagining a building that borrowed the padded moldings from Giulio Romano in order to incorporate them into social housing projects, which in turn contort themselves in order to create their own spaces, allowing a tree to rise up from the underground parking level, passing through slabs and emerging into the pedestrianised plaza above. Architecture and its buildings can be stories in themselves and tell the most fantastic of tales. Once I was walking through Kiev and came across a building crowned with mermaids, frogs, elephants, crocodiles and hippopotamuses emerging from its four façades. As expressive and unusual as Bomarzo, Las Pozas in Xilitla dreamed up and built by Edward James, or the ill-fated dragons struggling with Sant Jordi in countless modernist finishes and balustrades. Flores & Prats are ruminants who chew over ideas and shapes from one project to the next: from the box that unfolds into a showcase, to the cupboard taken out from their office to create the exhibition design of the Catalan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, to the exhibition of their own work in Copenhagen, for which they reproduced each one of their mystified gestures and outlines with delicacy and a sense of fun, to the invitations and cards made out of fragile and delicious biscuits, created by the confectioner Escribà, to the video that narrates the whole biscuit-making process, to the Willy Wonka-like, strawberries-and-cream lollipop converted into a kiosk on a square, to the objet trouvé to the Flores & Prats website itself, which opens up the door to their intimate and fascinating world of doors, drawers and folders containing stories and projects. Flores & Prats like to pull rabbits out of hats, conjuring up miracles to give more for less. It brings to mind silent movies, in which it is easy to find room for Monsieur Hulot—in Mon oncle by Jacques Tati—popping up in odd-shaped windows on the way upstairs to his apartment, or the labyrinthine routes through the Sala Beckett in Barcelona’s Poble Nou. Neither is it hard to imagine Flores & Prats as Buster Keaton, reordering a simple domestic program into a complex device of paths through the bizarre moments of a rooftop Sunday lunch chez the carpenter and cook, or the spatial transformation caused by their sons’ Scalextric track. A world that hails from a distant place, and one that perhaps needs to be sought in the house of the Dutch married couple in Pieter de Hooch’s painting, which enables them to put together a story in English with their Australian pupils, hypnotized by Eva’s eyes and Ricardo’s words. The gaze of Eva—or is it Alice?—tracks every movement of her interlocutor, underscoring the importance of any minor gesture that tries to dissipate Ricardo’s sweet semantic obstinacy. Flores & Prats benefit from each other even in their surnames (“Flowers” and “Meadows”), even when revealing the richness of their origins and languages without reducing it to the lowest common multiple, as so often happens with additions that end up as subtractions. Flores & Prats are one of those rare couples who complement and add to each other, who smile and share looks of complicity, who feel mutual recognition, who love and admire each other, along the same lines as Peter and Alison Smithson or Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi, and as opposed to the more cloying relationship of Charles and Ray Eames, or Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their work is a process without any predefined outcome. It is not the representation of a staged calligraphy from last century, but a ball of thread that unwinds to create loops and layers of a personal and irresistible world that draws you in. A universe as intimate as it is now global. The wonderland created by Flores & Prats is, without a shadow of a doubt, truly extraordinary.

Our lady of guadalupe, Mexico. Miniature Mexican altar fixed to a door of the Flores & Prats studio.Photograph: Adrià Goula

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Anti-IconsOn the Work of Flores & Prats

Juan José Lahuerta

My intention is not to interpret the work of Flores & Prats, for they can certainly do that better themselves, by making it and placing it in the world. I will, however, explore some of their works in an attempt to trace their route, the path taken by their work, which starts life in their hands, then leaves, and eventually returns again, and so on, since they never abandon it. In these first four lines I have tried to use a series of words that refer to actions of a real, living body: hands, make, place… This must be our starting point in order to understand Flores & Prats’s work, the point of contact which, in the final instance, means that the work only exists as each individual, specific work. In this sense, the work by Flores & Prats will be largely produced in the system of knots and connections that link each individual work to the others. Let us imagine a box of tools or a basket of toys: each piece is a single unit, with its own meaning and purpose—to varying extents. But when we take one thing out, it is tangled with something else. There is always a hook, a barb, a tape, a piece of wire, a length of cord. This assortment suddenly gives us ideas: the tool that we had not expected to find, the toy we had forgotten about, something that can be used instead of something else, or two things that can be used at once. Let us now imagine that there is a plan behind this completely surprising collection: the tools and the toys have been designed and made precisely in order to produce that knot or connection. Why should that be so strange? Playing and making things is all about tying and untying knots, and to make toys you need tools—tools that are precisely the opposite of the sword which, to use Huizinga’s descrip-tion, the spoilsport and ultra-rationalist Alexander the Great used to cut the Gordian Knot instead of wasting time by trying to undo it dexterously by hand. In a homogenous world in which tools are weapons that are only useful to make instant, clean breaks, Flores & Prats’s work, by contrast, takes its time and lingers in an unarmed experience: for them the tool is shaped by the hand, and the work by the hand and by the tool, in a continuous process, and assembly is less about cut-ting than tying and untying, indeed the latter is what really counts. Of course, resisting the division of labor leads to such a partition being inherently produced in oneself, within the body itself, and it is true that working by hand can exasperate the awareness of the hardness of the world and trigger the thought versus the ground. However, out of an admirably active and straightforward habit, Flores & Prats’s work seems to be opposed to making any cuts, and eschews dramatic flourishes, even though circumstances have generally pushed it to the margins, to a no-man’s land and to the peripheries, in other words, to places were the cut seems unavoidable, irreparable. Playful yet industrial, their work seems to confirm you can only build up experience by tying and untying. Making and using: one thing transforms the other, and vice-versa. Now let us take a look.

*

I believe in anima locus, and something tells me—and I’ll explain why below—that I share this feeling with Flores & Prats. And to see this, their studio on Calle Trafalgar in Barcelona is a good place to start. Studios change, but the places in which they are located retain their importance. Calle Trafalgar is one of those border streets between Barcelona’s old city and the Ensanche district, and it roughly follows the contours of the old city wall and the vacant plots that used to separate it on the inside of the outermost houses of the city. But it is not precisely a footprint, like the Rondas, which hug the city wall’s pen-tagon. Instead it seems to have come about more as a shortcut through a plot. Although straight, it is still far too crooked to be compared to the orthogonal street layout of the Ensanche; crooked but far too straight relative to the winding streets of the medieval city. On Calle Trafalgar we cannot make out the orientation of either one city or the other, and perhaps this is what makes it strangely beautiful. Another attractive feature is the relative regularity of the late-19th century and early-20th century buildings, built by master masons to whom the publica evenustati came naturally, without mystery or effort. Although, to be sure, all of these characteristics would fade into decorative or topographic details had Calle Trafalgar not always been put to an extraordinary use also. A line of wholesale warehouses used to fill this space—businesses that now have Chinese

Flores & Prats Studio, Barcelona. Dragon from Chinatown in New York; 1:50 scale model of the New Sala Beckett; photo-montage from an exhibition on Architecture from Barcelona of 1950s; cases containing the process of the Plaza Pio xii and Providencia House projects; through doorway, 1:1 scale prototype of formwork used on the façade of 111 Building.Photograph: Adrià Goula

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owners—so that entering this street literally used to bring a change of rhythm and scale; a line of homogenous ground floors, enormous shutters, large-scale antiquated signs, tall premises with cast-iron columns and long wooden counters on top of which fabrics were rolled out to the noise of the square wheel, piles of cloths, ribbons, zip fasteners, buttons… and this atmosphere of strange otherness still persists to this day, despite the area’s general decline. The studio is here, in the suspended state of this double or triple borderland, in one of those houses built by master masons with the tried and tested Barcelonese typology found in the Ensanche: a long and narrow apartment articulated by a corridor, the largest rooms positioned at each end, on one side facing the street, and on the other looking over the housing block’s courtyard, with a balcony; the flooring is finished with geometrically designed cement tiles and the ceiling has plaster moldings. As we enter, we immediately find how, in this not-to-scale section of the city, the studio restores all the proportions of a type of real world, summed up in the evidence of the privatae utilitati that those master masons did not even have to aim for, and which Flores & Prats, using the apartment, have literally absorbed. Walking down the corridor, the loose tiles play a familiar tune, the first sign that the rule around here is about contact: body, matter and effect—a sonic one in this case—a mutual understanding of body and building. For a construction material, or even a house itself, to make music, or even resonate to the movement of feet, is by no means a bad thing: I think that this could describe one of the essential, and not the least important, charac-teristics of the practice’s work. This quality is plain to see as we walk into the studio itself, with the mosaic tile music playing its tune, and behold what unfurls before our eyes: tables filled with drawings on paper, glass cabinets, boxes and wooden models… This is not to say that this studio lacks monitors and computers, they are inevitably present too, but that what is visible—what fills the corridor and the rooms and grabs your attention, in the strictest sense of the word, inviting you to manipulate it—is the cardboard, paper, wood, pencil… Unlike the aseptic studios of mass production, which focus primar-ily on exhibition, Flores & Prats, intensely absorbed with manual materials and work, is a practice that instead appears to argue for the importance of use-value and of leaving a trace behind them. The evidence of the concrete that is emitted by the resonating tiles is no different to that produced in the constant assembly and disassembly of one of their particular boîtes-en-valise—which we will be looking at shortly—or of one of their models. The bodily proximity, the authentic art of contact, running through all their work, begins in this studio, or more accurately their workshop or atelier. Architects usually have offices, because they are essentially producing documents; the studio, however, evokes a feeling of silent and solitary meditation, where the artist invents by thinking, near to ideas and far removed from the hardness of material. But the atelier is a place of material and contamination in doing work by hand. Work produced by studios such as Flores & Prats, which, as I mentioned above, resists any division of labor, can only be achieved in the continuous exchange of the atelier—an exchange between people, and between people and the material world, in the broadest sense. From this perspective, the impressive models made by Flores & Prats when developing their projects could be interpreted as a substitute, one that is precise rather than being at all naïve or nostalgic, for the impossible—to make their work by using their own hands. The secrets of the miniature are best expressed in the model, in which everything is contemplated in a single glance, simultane-ously, from all sides, with the all-conquering eye, and everything is arranged with the most skillful hand. In short, models are clearly a metaphor and an instrument of power: the world is in the palm of your hand. Yet this is not the case with Flores & Prats’s models. Realists in the making, and idealists (not dreamers) in believing that this making can give release to them and whoever uses or inhabits their work, Flores and Prats see models as the closest solution, albeit always provisional, to the equation of creativity and use-value. Instead of growing in their models’ presence quo modo deus—or as the king play-ing with his armies of lead soldiers in order to feel the pleasure of power over his subjects without danger—they prefer to inhabit their models, in whose honeycombed shapes the entire length of the project is compressed. Ultimately the model, with its intense material quality of a precise miniature, with its detachable parts that fit together so snugly, with its ubiquity full of means, with its perspectives which, opening and closing, show the constant modification of the work in its processes, with its anticipation of experience, acquires, in the work of Flores & Prats, great power; the model highlights its handcrafted quality, in which architecture seems able to hold out against being converted into merchandise and exchange-value. The model is truly a microcosm. It is entirely perfect, faithful, certain. Taking into account, as we will see below, the positive value given by Flores & Prats to imperfections in their built works, the model is placed before the finished article as the first and final proof of what cannot be done—but which must be done. Maybe this is why models are not an end in themselves. By filling up the studio as they do, they end up influencing the furniture itself, giving some pieces of furniture the appearance of models too. Similarly, the models end up looking like the furniture. For instance the legs, or rather the props, that support the large model of Casal Balaguer, strike me as very important because they evoke an print by Lemercier that represents the modello of the San Giovanni dei Fiorentini church by Michelangelo, a building that I have always found intriguing. Lemercier does not show us the model in the usual way, suspended in a vacuum or transformed into the future building in its physical surroundings, but instead he shows it completely naked, exhibiting its condition as a model to the point of exasperation, laid out on a wooden board held up by some crossbeams supported by the sturdy legs of some workshop trestles. The meticulous realism with which he drew that table, showing the imperfections and grain of the wood and crudely exaggerating the fittings of the legs and crossbars, contrasts with the purity of the model above, and even more so with the beauty of the resulting building that we can imagine. Yet this is not the most striking contrast, The outside wall of the Michelangelo church, with its over-sized order and commanding attic level, behind which rise the heavy vaults of the chapels, on top of which lies the large, smooth cylinder, the mighty cornice and the dome, all evoke a building designed—

Church of San giovanni dei Fiorentini by Michelangelo. Print by Jacques Lemercier, 1607.

Model of Casal Balaguer in Palma de Mallorca. Design of stand and small test model by Lucas Wilson, 2009.Photograph: Adrià Goula

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