ESALA_Flores & Prats Through the Drawing Workshop 2021

Through the Drawing 

20 students from all years in Landscape Architecture and Architecture met every Monday in March as part of a workshop led by Barceloa based architects, Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats (ESALA Geddes Visiting Fellows 2021). This was an adjunct to curricula work or practice, and the workshop culminated in film screenings and a discussion open to the whole school. To begin, participants chose one of their own favourite project drawings. Introductory lectures and group work sessions led by Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores included individual storyboarding and exploratory fabrications with technical assistance from Jonny Pugh.

Eva and Ricardo write: “Many intuitive decisions taken during the development of a project are made visible through documents such as drawings, models or collages. Each one of these documents develops a small part of the story that the whole project intends to achieve. These documents are developed with their own independency, and therefore can be explained with their own logic and qualities.  Then there is another stage in this process: a film comes to animate and put these documents in action by introducing movement on them, making evident situations that otherwise remain invisible. The drawings, worlds of illusions, are now animated by the films, which start to explain a new story inside them. These films become at its time new illusions, projected on the drawings which hold them and frame them. We are now trapped inside these magical pieces, alive in themselves.”

Kanto Maeda writes: “I had an enriching experience, exploring the narratives of architecture through my personal love of creating hand-drawn animations. Learning directly from the founders of a practice I hugely admire, felt not only like an honour but a unique experience different to employment, with the joy of having philosophical discussions, while getting to know how Eva and Ricardo work (Ricardo, it turns out, has a fantastic dead-pan humour)”