Emotional Heritage presents, for the first time in France, the ongoingwork of Flores & Prats architects, exploring how places and built spaces can be understood as living repositories of emotions and memories. The exhibition unfolds through an immersive installation that shows the studio’s working environment, allowing visitors to engage directly with the methodological processes that underpin the practice. Through drawings, models, and spatial narratives, the project demonstrates how the creative reuse of existing buildings can offer a meaningful and forward-looking direction for contemporary architecture.
This approach to reusing the inherited environment is grounded in a deliberate refusal of demolition and a deep respect for the layered histories embedded within each site. By acknowledging and valuing the diverse stories that have unfolded over time, architecture becomes a tool for continuity rather than rupture, enabling the gradual emergence of new programs, uses, and ways of life. In this perspective, buildings and places remain active participants in everyday life, preserving and renewing the social, emotional, and personal relationships that have been patiently constructed across time.
Founded in 1998 by Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, the architecture studio Flores & Prats combines architectural design, project management, and an intense teaching activity. Following their time in the studio of Enric Miralles, the two architects developed an approach in which research is inseparable from the responsibility to design and build. Their work pays particular attention to the way buildings are interpreted and experienced by the public, considering this as an essential part of their research practice.
Their projects, mostly commissioned through open competitions, explore themes such as the rehabilitation and reuse of abandoned or ruined buildings, social housing and its capacity to foster community bonds, as well as urban public spaces designed with the participation of residents. The firm has also developed mobile or portable projects, experimented with film as a tool for architectural documentation, and conceived original formats such as edible architecture menus, presented during exhibitions in Barcelona and Copenhagen.