To visit the abandoned building of the former Pau i Justícia Cooperative to do the contest meant entering a time tunnel, which took us to the moment when it was used as a meeting place, a small theatre, a social room and for parties. It still retained much of the decoration on walls, ceilings and floors, which helped us understand the different occupations that the building had had: hydraulic mosaic floors, wooden carpentry with stained glass, cornices and rose windows in the rooms... they all define large spaces, unusual for Barcelona if we weren’t in an area of the city with an industrial past. The state of physical decay in which we found this building interested us, but not because we wanted to return it to its original state; instead, we intended to bring this ruin forward, and make it participate, with its unfinished character and overlapping styles and eras, in a new reality that can continue to be updated on it. Thus, the project recovers a building present in the collective memory of this neighbourhood, maintaining its spirit so that it is naturally reincorporated into its cultural dynamics and where the neighbours, many of them former cooperative members, are recognised in it. Therefore, when we started working, we made an inventory of everything that could be recovered from the building and which we relocated in different places and in a different way to where they were originally located. These elements - floors, windows, doors, wooden stairs, moldings and rose windows - return to the building in an operation of recovery, adaptation and re-use.
