Exhibition: Flores & Prats: Meeting at the Building

Where is social housing construction headed? How can you build communities that people will want to both live and meet in? A new exhibition shows the results of a number of workshops held in collaboration between the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and the Spanish architectural firm Flores & Prats, inviting debate about meaningful social housing development and architecture that is so appealing you want to eat it.

Social and public housing calls for political as well as architectural attention in the city and housing scale. Although offering vital and qualitative answers to needs for housing in the welfare society, and including important shares of the cultural heritage ongoing transformations these years, the image is not only positive but also attached to segregation, social and functional problems. Needs for maintenance, care and coordination of political attention, resources and planning competences from public and private actors are raised. However, the limited dimensions and the close community of neighbours may yet regain their value and be considered a gift and an obvious way of building bridges between people. This is the message conveyed by an exhibition in which 20 Danish students and teachers of architecture have examined social housing in Barcelona and Copenhagen in collaboration with architects and visiting lecturers Ricardo Flores & Eva Prats.

The Spanish architectural firm Flores & Prats and the School of Architecture’s Study Department 2 have been collaborating since 2003. In 2013, this lead to a double workshop under the title Social Community that looked at social aspects of public construction in Barcelona and Copenhagen. The result is a series of studies of how social housing can bring people together in times of crisis.