THROUGH THE CANVAS
Architecture Inside Dutch Paintings
Edited by Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats, May 2008
Printed and distributed by ACTAR, Barcelona
ENGLISH
> view sample of book including excerpts “De Hooch’s rooms”, Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats, and “The Value of the Studio”, Ricardo Flores
Through the Canvas celebrates the Design Studio conceived and directed in 2004 by Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats for students of architecture at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The three parts of the book – ‘De Hooch’s Rooms’: an introduction of the theme to the students, ‘The Exercises’: the work in progress of the studio itself, and ‘Epilogue’: a final conclusion through a series of articles by the members of the Jury – follow the sequence in which the theme was introduced, developed and debated during the week-long studio.
Based on the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch’s work. Flores & Prats propose an exercise of architectural design through observation, strongly linked to the act of the making of things by hand. This studio, the big room where the workshop took place, contained people and work for five days. The accumulation – of drawings, models, photographs, dust and tiredness – allowed the overlapping of different materials, producing new ideas which at the time sparked new work.
The effect of this publication has been in trying to reflect and reproduce this intensity, and to give continuity to a mass of material by putting together most of the drawings and photographs taken in situ. The idea of the book is not to favour the finished object – the projects – but to underline the process by which the projects came about. Taking the intermediate material as the valuable product from where the final proposal can be seen. Correspondingly, the book contains not only drawings of completed projects, but more about the material produced during the evolution of the workshop.
With essays by Michael Tawa, Gevork Hartoonian, Charles Rice and Tarsha Finney, and with an introductory text by Rachel Neeson.
> view article on Through the Canvas in Eupalionos N.29 (CATALÁ), Laboratorio 09 (ITALIANO), and STOÀ 10 (ITALIANO / ENGLISH)