Books

> purchase here: C2C / La Capell / Libreria Finestres
> more information on Studio Prats ETH Zurich, 2019-21
> excerpt (pages 4-17) “Building Communities: moving from practice to academia”, Eva Prats & Ricardo Flores
> Sant Jordi book signing @ COAC, 23rd April 2024
> Book presentation, Catalunya Radio ‘Perspectiva’, 12th April 2024

Building Communities, Rehabilitation and Housing in Barcelona and Zurich documents the process and work done by the students of Eva Prats (Studio Prats) at ETH Zurich D-Arch between 2019-2021, including contributions from collaborators to the studio and visiting critics such as An Fonteyne, Adam Caruso, Philip Christou, Andrew Clancy and Philip Ursprung.

Building Communities is a studio interested in working with the architecture that shapes the networks of human relationships, a net that holds together people and buildings from different backgrounds and different times. The studio aims to identify, give sense and propose a community between new and old neighbours, between new and old fragments of a built city.
When we talk about building communities, we are thinking on a new community built within the city that exists, inviting the new neighbours incorporated by the projects to interact with those who already live in the place. The studio proposes to work in urban contexts in transformation, sometimes in a derelict condition as part of its change due to planning or speculation. As an exercise on urban rehabilitation, the challenge of the studio is to observe and identify the qualities of the social and physical fabric of the area, putting them in action so that they can contribute to create a new chapter in this neighbourhood.
To work with the social fabric of a neighbourhood is to observe and incorporate the memory of hundreds of civic, cultural or personal relationships that the neighbourhood had built over time, and still remain invisible but latent. But not only people contain the memory of a neighbourhood, streets and buildings are also loaded with memories of the uses of the place: the built fabric is the reflection of a social behaviour. It speaks of a way of using the ground, the sky, of a way of inhabiting… To read the memory contained in buildings and in people is to think about a future that counts on that past.

Eva Prats & Ricardo Flores