Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores started their Barcelona-based practice, Flores & Prats Arquitectes in 1998 after both worked at the office of Enric Miralles. They overlapped for about one year there, from 1993 to 1994. After her nine-year stint with Miralles, Eva won the EUROPAN III International Housing Competition with a friend. The success that led to a real commission and was going to be built, served as the springboard for starting their independent practice. Shortly thereafter they won another competition. Ricardo joined Eva after working for five years with Miralles. By then they were a couple for three years and decided to start working together. Today they practice out of the same sprawling apartment where Eva’s original studio rented a room along with several other young architects and designers. Even though the office now occupies the entire space—the architects told me they typically employ ten, no more than twelve people—they keep traces and memories of the former “dwellers” alive. Curiously, Eva and Ricardo implement the same strategy in their architectural projects as well.
The very first competition project the architects worked on together, they won. It was an urban plan for a small town near Barcelona. Soon new commissions followed. The partners kept working in similar ways they did with Miralles—drawing, drawing over, making models, and continuing to draw. In our recent interview that follows a short introduction, they told me, “The way we work is as if we try to avoid solving problems quickly. It is more about testing different themes until we identify the most challenging way through, something that would be new for us and that would allow us to get into new research, a new world that the project opens for us.”
