Circle of Life

[Originally published in The Architectural Review December 2019/January 2020]

Article 12 of the 1964 Venice Charter of the International Council on Monuments, states the following: “Replacements of missing parts must integrate harmoniously with the whole, but at the same time be distinguishable from the original so that restoration does not falsify the artistic or historic evidence.” This document, which establishes the heritage restoration guidelines still in use today, explains why so many historic building restorations emphasise a sharp contrast between old and new; a visual trope that has come to express a certain idea of historical rupture or discontinuity between past and present. Never mind that most historic buildings are, themselves, products of multiple interventions and adaptations throughout the ages. For some reason, historical changes are never considered ‘falsifications’, whereas contemporary ones are – which is why the latter must always be ‘distinguishable’.

Architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats do not subscribe to this ethos of discontinuity, so in their project to transform Barcelona’s Cooperativa de Pau i Justícia (Peace and Justice Cooperative) building into the Sala Beckett theatre and drama centre, they decided to reuse as much as possible the very architectural components that make up the old building, resituating and adapting them to fulfil similar roles within a new configuration. The outcome is an architectural metamorphosis that is not readily distinguishable; one that appears, on the surface, as though little – if anything – has changed. The reuse of the building and many of its components has revived an urban social relationship with the neighbourhood that was interrupted by decades of abandonment after the demise of the cooperative in the 1980s, almost a century after its founding. Ironically, it was precisely the building’s lack of heritage protection that permitted Flores & Prats to create this architecture of continuity.

[Please continue reading at The Architectural review]