The project, carried out by Flores&Prats, Architects, has maintained the essence of the old cooperative Pau i Justícia living with it. They have not finished with the existing, replacing, but taking it to the present. Doors, floors or wall finishes remain unshakable witness of another time.
The new Sala Beckett house two theaters, an area of training, a rehearsal room, offices and a bar. The architects have been involved with this and another project at the 15th Venice Biennale in the Spanish Pavilion. With the Casa Balaguer Cultural Center and next to the Adriá Goula´s photographic series Re-Edificatoria, with this project we are presenting now. The Spanish public television gave them a space with a small story on the genesis and development of the New Sala Beckett.
Description of the project by Flores&Prats
Sala Beckett.
Sala Beckett is a theater, but above all is a creative space and meeting. It is not a theater billboard, ie, not a space to open the shutter ten minutes before start function and have come close when viewers. It is a space that opens the blinds early in the morning and in which throughout the day things happen. Sala Beckett is a theater exhibits, but also training, where experienced, is sought and manipulates time. Away from the rhythms of the industry, the rhythms of leisure culture, trying to formation of creators in this case shows dramaturgos- and display are two sides of the same coin joined by other branches such as, for example, experimentation. Over 25 years of existence, Beckett has become a theatrical space of reference in Barcelona, giving a prominent place playwrights formation and programming of contemporary European dramaturgy of living authors and active. So one of the challenges when designing a new headquarters, was leading the team of the Sala Beckett to a new place without the magic created by them for so many years was lost.
Ruin.
Visiting the left of the former Cooperative Peace and Justice at the time of the architectural competition building was entering a time tunnel that took us to the time when it was used as a meeting place, small theater, social hall and holidays. Still retained much of the decoration on walls, ceilings and floors, which helped us to understand the various occupations that had been having: hydraulic mosaic floors, woodworks with colored glass, cornices and rosettes in the rooms ... defined large spaces, unusual for Barcelona if not because we are in an area of the city with an industrial past. Despite the abandonment, we found a building whose walls and ceilings were still full of stories and emotions that the project could incorporate. So the new Sala Beckett gets a building present in the associative collective memory of this neighborhood, keeping his spirit, his memory load incorporated into their spaces, to be reincorporated naturally to its cultural dynamics and neighbors, many of them old cooperators, recognized in him.
Draft.
This state of physical decay in we found this building interested us not to return to its initial state, but to bring that ruin forward and make it participate, with its unfinished nature and overlapping times, in a new reality that he could continue to be updated about her. Draw the new Sala Beckett in the former workers' cooperative has been moving forward and backward in time, working in continuity with what we inherit, drawing from the old building what we proposed. Now, the old and the new work at a time, a place where creators, audience, principals and students are and where old ghosts of consumer cooperative, still present, awaiting the arrival of Beckett room, together, imagine different worlds and create new fictions.
