Books

> book presentation (Catalan with English subtitles)
> purchase from Arquine / La Capell
> excerpt (pages 190-195) “The discipline of the existing, after Sala Beckett” by Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats

The Workers Cooperative Pau i Justícia in Poblenou, very active for much of the twentieth century, closed its doors in the late 1990s and left the building abandoned and in an advanced state of ruin.

The Sala Beckett, one of the driving forces of Catalan theatre since its foundation in the late 1980s as the headquarters of the company El Teatro Fronterizo of José Sanchis Sinisterra, and directed by Toni Casares since 1997, was left without its headquarters in the neighbourhood of Gràcia, in the mid-2000s.

Following a public competition in 2011, the Sala Beckett team and Flores & Prats studio undertook a process of rehabilitation of this former Workers Cooperative to convert it into the new Sala Beckett / International Drama Centre. The building, abandoned for more than twenty years, was still very present in the memory of the neighbours living around it, so, this became the recovery of social heritage as well as physical heritage. The final result captures the era of the Cooperative, the era of abandonment, and the era of the new Sala Beckett.

Sala Beckett was the winner of the City of Barcelona Prize of Architecture and Urbanism 2016, and The Architectural Review New into old awards 2019.