Emmanuelle Borne. The exhibition Emotional Heritage extends the one you presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. While some of the elements shown at arc en rêve – drawings, models, and films – already existed, you are presenting here a new scenography adapted to the configuration of the large gallery of the Bordeaux architecture center. Could you first explain why you chose the title “Emotional Heritage”?
Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores. “Emotional Heritage” reflects the attention we pay to the intangible dimension of built heritage. We seek to capture what lingers in the air, what charges the atmosphere of a place, the emotion it generates. This intangible dimension is linked to the memorial weight of a building, to the vestiges that bear the traces of the generations who inhabited the site and helped define the space entrusted to us. These traces of ghosts are what we wish to preserve as architects.
EB. You are concerned not only with the ghosts of the past, but also with the specters of the future…
EP and RF. Yes, rehabilitation work must also take into account the users who will inhabit the space after our intervention. We must prepare what comes next, make room for those arriving, who through their own appropriations will in turn imprint the site with their own fictions. To achieve this, we have developed a working methodology that combines hand drawing, representations at multiple scales – from detailed observations at 1:20 to wider views of the urban context at around 1:500 – and study models produced at corresponding scales, allowing us to explore and test a range of rehabilitation scenarios.
EB. For the exhibition at arc en rêve, as in Venice, you embraced a deliberately dense display, distributing these graphic documents, along with the models, the 2-by-3-metre photographs, and the films, across the six parts of the gallery to explore a variety of themes.
EP and RF. Even before entering the exhibition space, we installed a small paper theater of the Sala Beckett Drama Center in Barcelona (2017), symbolizing the fragile condition of ruins. This small installation, together with the models standing on long legs that greet visitors in the entrance, is intended to convey that whenever we embark on a project, those who came before us remain present – like guiding spirits who continue to inspire and inform our work.
EB. The first space presents the first of the four themes you chose to explore, “Drawing with Time,” illustrated through the Mills Museum in Mallorca, created from the transformation of a 17th-century flour mill into a museum (2002). You place particular emphasis on the observation phase that preceded the design of your project, during which you documented the various stages in the life of a building through hand-drawn sketches...
EP and RF. Here, we wanted to present the accumulation of eras within a building. We chose to highlight this observation phase, which we carry out by drawing places by hand, primarily in pencil, exactly as they appear to us. We prefer this mode of representation to photographic inventory because it allows us to better grasp construction elements, to understand how a building consolidated over time, and to perceive more sensitive and sometimes invisible traces. Hand drawing allows us to assemble a body of archives documenting the building’s cultural, constructive, and economic context. This mode of representation commits us to a process comparable to an archaeological approach. It opens the way to precise questions, for example regarding what generated the placement of an opening in one place rather than another. In a sense, we enter into collaboration with time. We never know in advance which elements of the past we will uncover, nor which will prove useful for future appropriations. Drawing enables attentiveness, without prejudging what we like or dislike, so that only afterward, in relation to the program, can we decide what to preserve and how.
EB. How much time do you devote to studying the traces of time?
EP and RF. We need a few months to compile these archives of the existing condition, which we then consult throughout the duration of a project to verify the relevance of our decisions. We generally proceed through subtraction, for example by clarifying circulation paths or creating new openings to capture light, while trying to do so in continuity with the existing structure. For instance, the mill’s grain machinery area had been illegally occupied by families who had opened doors and windows there. We preserved these openings, which helped us sequence the museum route.
EB. The second space is devoted to the Casal Balaguer Cultural Center in Mallorca (in collaboration with Duch-Pizà Arquitectes), through the theme “The Right to Inherit.” That is, the right each generation has to transform and adapt a building to a new program and new uses. Casal Balaguer is, in this respect, a remarkable case study..
EP and RF. Yes, without this right to inherit, buildings become relics, fixed and lifeless objects. We have been engaged in the transformation of Casal Balaguer for 18 years. The project has unfolded in five phases, the first completed in 2010 and the last in 2016. It is very slow because the project depends on public funding, but that suits us perfectly. This building is a true time capsule: originally built in the 14th century, the family house was extended in the 16th century and again in the 18th century. When we won the competition to transform it into a cultural center in 2001, it was already a collage of different eras. We had to rehabilitate it without losing the thread of its Mallorcan history. Sometimes the existing structure resists the introduction of a new program. In those cases, we seek to complete the architectural palimpsest rather than force our way into it. The arc en rêve exhibition includes a video showing how different fragments of this building resonate with one another. For example, we designed and built a staircase anchored to the existing tower: each benefits from the other’s openings, like Romeo and Juliet. We also chose to exhibit scale models that served as tests for creating connections, for instance between the patio and the dome. Emotional Heritage presents rehabilitated buildings, but above all our internal workshop, our working process.
EB. The third space illustrates, through models and drawings of the Sala Beckett (2016) and the rehabilitation project for the Yutes warehouses in Barcelona (2005), the theme of “Use Value.” This refers both to the reuse of existing buildings for purposes other than their original function and to the way you reuse elements of these buildings in situ. In Sala Beckett, you created a veritable exquisite corpse. As for Yutes, it was the first time you worked with contemporary heritage…
EP and RF. Indeed, until Yutes projetc, we had mainly worked on historical vestiges. In this case, it was actually the clients, textile manufacturers, who sensitized us to the quality of this 20th-century industrial heritage. We studied every element, every fragment, without prejudging their economic value. Drawing and cataloguing doors or windows, even ordinary ones, helps enrich the studio’s architectural culture. The clients encouraged us to use everything already on site rather than discard it: they familiarized us with this type of radical reuse. We dismantled, restored, and reinstalled certain elements, such as the windows. The challenge here was to create additional storage spaces. Ultimately, we also reorganized the space, transforming balconies into circulation areas, for example.
EB. The fourth and fifth spaces of the gallery are devoted to the rehabilitation project for the Théâtre des Variétés, which you are currently carrying out in Brussels, in collaboration with Ouest architecture.
EP and RF. We set up a ten-metre-long table, around which visitors are invited to browse through archival drawings and notebooks of varying sizes and project phases, like guests at a banquet invited to help themselves. These documents present every phase in the rehabilitation design process for this 1930s building through drawings, plans, photographs, and models. The 3-by-2-metre axonometric drawing does more than depict the central forum; it also served as a way of ensuring that the project’s original ambition had not been diluted throughout the design process.
EB. Like the layers of the buildings you rehabilitate, the exhibition Emotional Heritage is itself a three-layered palimpsest. It is an exhibition presenting your projects, as well as the behind-the-scenes aspects of your approach. Ultimately, it is also a reflection on the act of display itself, with, in the sixth bay of the gallery, a mise en abyme of the exhibition through a hyper-realistic model that reproduces your scenography for the space at scales of 1:25 and 1:10.
EP et RF. This model is placed at the end of the exhibition route. We installed it there so that visitors, retracing their steps through the galleries they have just discovered, would look at the exhibition anew… We also present an editing montage by Jonny Pugh (Studio Films), compiling different films we created together for the studio that we had never before shown in an exhibition context. He edited them into diptychs and triptychs so as to reveal resonances between different projects by the studio. Emotional Heritage is an exhibition of resonances – between generations, between eras, between our projects, and between our different modes of documentation and representation. • Interview conducted at arc en rêve on April 23, 2026.
