REMEMBER, REVEAL & CONSTRUCT
Remember Reveal Construct is an active seminar series undertaken every during our studio sessions. The seminar sessions ensure that the designs created by Continuity in Architecture are grounded on a theoretical background and research. These will explore how context can generate architectural difference, and from this discuss how contemporary architectural design may incorporate this.
To understand the theoretical background a model of the Sala Beckett, Barcelona by Flores & Prats was made.
The project is deeply rooted in the memory of the neighbourhood Poblenou. Built inside a former workers’ cooperative building and celebration hall. These neighbours must recognize the spaces in their memories. The design process has been done with the utmost respect towards the former social club. It is now a place to celebrate theatrical creation and is named after Samuel Beckett, a playwright.
Image of the Sala Beckett, Barcelona.
Public and Private
“The result is that these areas of the plan – the private parts of the house – form a kind of residue, or poche, distinct from the public rooms. The gran public sequence thus seems a function of the site rather than of the building, and a separation between public and private is thereby provided.”- ‘Public and Private’, Michael Dennis, 1986.
The Sala Beckett building bears closer resemblance to the discontinuous designs of the French hotels than to Palladian ideals of design. It is roughly symmetrical in plan; the long foyer space splits the building down the middle, and the large theatre hall is placed approximately in the centre. However, there is little overall symmetry beyond this; rooms are of varying sizes and walls are placed at strange angles as the building’s function has changed over time. There is also little sign of any “overall design”; the building is instead a collection of mismatched elements from it’s past that have been accrued over time, creating a collage of different styles and periods.
Plan showing public and private.
Sections of the Sala Beckett, drawings by the architect.
Bricolage
Sala Beckett shows conspicuous traces of use: walls with peeling paint, knackered plaster and fragments of mosaic tiles. Like the activities it houses, the building is conceived as a work in progress. This aims to reflect the previous uses and help to instigate future re-purpose of the building.
“why should we be obliged to prefer a nostalgia for the future to that for the past?...Could not this ideal city…behave, quite explicitly, as both a theatre of prophecy and a theatre of memory?”
- Colin Rowe, Collage City
Images of bricolage within the building.
Photograph of the atrium.
Model of the atrium.
Conical Intersect
Similar to the 1975 work ‘Conical Intersect’, this sculptural incision distorts the structural logic of the existing building. Flores and Prats do not retreat from the building’s past, or exclude it’s traces. It emphasises the connection between old and new and creates a continuity between the two different time periods. This unique approach to conservation prevents any false reconstructions of the past, protecting the integrity the community’s collective identity.
“Environmental modifications resulting from this recrudescent fear of the unassailable have been undertaken in two distinct, but not mutually exclusive ways: retreat and exclusion.”
- Robin Evans, 1978
Gordon Matta Clark, Conical intersect, 1975.
Photograph of light well.
Model of light well.
Ornamentation
Each significant element has been carefully collected, from the frames to the doors, the polychrome tiles, rose windows, the stratifications present in the masonry fabric and the plaster work. the design process included an in-depth study of the environmental characteristics, identified and developed through numerous drawings and detailed study models. We have aimed to show this by modelling each of the doors and windows in detail.
Executions of details confirm architectural greatness...
it is only in the details that we can avoid building failure.
It is in the detail that lie the possibilities of innovation and invention.
-Marco Frascari
The Tell-The-Tale Detail (1981)
Architects drawings of the doors.
Photograph of new window.
Model of new window.
Process image of model showing interior materiality.