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In this first stage, the catalogue focuses on the modern and contemporary architecture designed and built between 1832 –year of construction of the first industrial chimney in Barcelona that we establish as the beginning of modernity– until today.
The project is born to make the architecture more accessible both to professionals and to the citizens through a website that is going to be updated and extended. Contemporary works of greater general interest will be incorporated, always with a necessary historical perspective, while gradually adding works from our past, with the ambitious objective of understanding a greater documented period.
The collection feeds from multiple sources, mainly from the generosity of architectural and photographic studios, as well as the large amount of excellent historical and reference editorial projects, such as architectural guides, magazines, monographs and other publications. It also takes into consideration all the reference sources from the various branches and associated entities with the COAC and other collaborating entities related to the architectural and design fields, in its maximum spectrum.
Special mention should be made of the incorporation of vast documentation from the COAC Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.
The rigour and criteria for selection of the works has been stablished by a Documental Commission, formed by the COAC’s Culture Spokesperson, the director of the COAC Historical Archive, the directors of the COAC Digital Archive, and professionals and other external experts from all the territorial sections that look after to offer a transversal view of the current and past architectural landscape around the territory.
The determination of this project is to become the largest digital collection about Catalan architecture; a key tool of exemplar information and documentation about architecture, which turns into a local and international referent, for the way to explain and show the architectural heritage of a territory.
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2019-2024 Aureli Mora i Omar OrnaqueDocumental Commission:
2019-2024 Ramon Faura Carolina B. Garcia Francesc Rafat Antoni López Daufí Joan Falgueras Anton Pàmies Mercè Bosch Josep Ferrando Fernando Marzá Aureli Mora Omar OrnaqueExternal Collaborators:
2019-2024 Lluis Andreu Sergi Ballester Helena Cepeda Inès Martinel Maria Jesús QuinteroWith the support of:
Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de CulturaCollaborating Entities:
ArquinFADFundació Mies van der Rohe
Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico
Arxiu Mas
Basílica de la Sagrada Família
Museu del Disseny de Barcelona
EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona
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We kindly invite you to help us improve the dissemination of Catalan architecture through this space. Here you can propose works and provide or amend information on authors, photographers and their work, along with adding comments. The Documentary Commission will analyze all data. Please do only fill in the fields you deem necessary to add or amend the information.
The Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya is one of the most important documentation centers in Europe, which houses the professional collections of more than 180 architects whose work is fundamental to understanding the history of Catalan architecture. By filling this form, you can request digital copies of the documents for which the Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya manages the exploitation of the author's rights, as well as those in the public domain. Once the application has been made, the Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya will send you an approximate budget, which varies in terms of each use and purpose.
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Memory
The building, intended to cover a sanitary need that was very common at the time, does not meet the street alignments but is organised into two parallel bodies oriented from east to west and articulated in an L shape. You enter the enclosure through a semi-public garden that gives direct access to both bodies. The block on the north side contains the surgeries, laboratories and archives. The body at the bottom of the site houses the conference room and the library on the upper floors. The layout of all the rooms, the circulation system and the treatment of the façades respond to a rigorous monitoring of the program and the solar abacus, regardless of the constraints of the location. It is a model of inserting the concepts of rationalism into a fabric that is not taken into account, and which is implicitly criticised for the strict functionality of the building itself.
Together with the Bloc House, the Tuberculosis Clinic represents an urban and architectural manifesto of the GATCPAC that lays the foundations of the Macià Plan, a plan that arises from the direct application of the Ville Radieuse in Barcelona and that was developed jointly by the GATCPAC and Le Corbusier. Had it not been for the Civil War, the sum of values that encompass the traditional city, the Cerdà Plan and the Macià Plan would have turned Barcelona into a laboratory of urban excellence and architectural quality, endorsed by the City Council and the Republican Generalitat.
The harsh health and social conditions in Barcelona derived from industrial development since the beginning of the 19th century were the cause of the progressive increase in tuberculosis cases. In 1934, the Department of Health and Social Welfare of the Republican Generalitat commissioned J. Ll. Sert, J. B. Subirana and J. Torres Clavé, founders of GATCPAC, the project of a tuberculosis clinic within their policy of hospital socialisation and fight against tuberculosis. This clinic is located in the Raval, a district that the Macià Plan intended to sanitise by filling the most degraded and densified interiors of the block due to industrialisation, since it had begun within the walls.
The building is designed in an L shape, completing the traditional street and opening up to the interior of the block. The interior garden serves as an access and responds to the hygienist demands of modernity, reconciling the compact morphology of the traditional city with the naturalistic demand of the garden cities. The structure is metallic and clearly differs from the enclosures, which are resolved with new light materials: iron carpentry, block walls, asbestos-cement rainwater, etc.
Finished during the Civil War, it is one of the most representative works of the Catalan rationalist movement, a paradigm of the Ville Radieuse and of the architectural principles debated internationally at the CIAM.
Located in the most degraded part of Barcelona in the 1930s, the Tuberculosis Clinic was a project that revealed all the virtues of modernity that GATPAC had been trying to spread in previous years against the infected city inherited from the past centuries, specifically from the old town within the walls.
The Generalitat de Catalunya used this irregular site in 1933 as part of its fight against the disease, and the architects’ volumetric response was the placement of two parallel but only partially facing linear blocks, joined by a corridor in an L shape, together with a small pavilion dedicated to the goal and supported on stilts. The plants of the general body are repeated unchanged four times. At the functional level, the strict dispensary program was divided between the ground floor and the first. The ground floor contained the reception and at the same time the waiting and admission rooms for the patients, while on the first floor the nursing room and the surgeries were located. The second floor was intended for the study of the disease, with an archive, library and conference room, while the third floor was reserved for the headquarters of the Tuberculosis Fight of Catalonia. Due to the restrictions on the site and the unhealthy nature prevailing in the neighbourhood, the roof was used for the highly recommended heliotherapeutic treatments to alleviate the disease.
However, the structure was solved with metal porticos that freed the interiors and façades from the limitations posed by the load-bearing walls for such a changing program. The materials used, such as glass and uralite in the coatings, helped to support an architectural language based on rationality, achievement, ventilation, programmatic functionality and the adaptation of the different scales of the building to those of the constructions that surrounded it. It was the way to transmit to an entire district the almost messianic bonanzas that the dogma of an incipient modernity in the country had engraved without apparent cracks. The building, however, was inaugurated in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.
The clinic summarises all the ideological postulates and hopes that its authors had hitherto formulated theoretically and developed in isolation. The controversial use of new materials is combined with respect for the construction tradition. It is an innovative and modern work of official hospital architecture that already set some parameters used in hospitals later.
Within the framework of the GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Artists and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture), created in 1930 as the group of the east sector of the GATEPAC (Group of Spanish Artists and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) and commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Welfare of the Generalitat Republicana, in 1934 the Central Antituberculosis Dispensary, designed by Sert, Torres Clavé and Subirana, was designed in an attempt to socialise the hospital. This dispensary was part of a campaign against tuberculosis and had full respect for rationalist postulates. The structure of the building responded to a new conception of hospital medicine and a more modern distribution of spaces.
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Tuberculosis Clinic
GATCPAC, Josep Lluís Sert, Joan Baptista Subirana i Subirana, Josep Torres Clavé
The building, intended to cover a sanitary need that was very common at the time, does not meet the street alignments but is organised into two parallel bodies oriented from east to west and articulated in an L shape. You enter the enclosure through a semi-public garden that gives direct access to both bodies. The block on the north side contains the surgeries, laboratories and archives. The body at the bottom of the site houses the conference room and the library on the upper floors. The layout of all the rooms, the circulation system and the treatment of the façades respond to a rigorous monitoring of the program and the solar abacus, regardless of the constraints of the location. It is a model of inserting the concepts of rationalism into a fabric that is not taken into account, and which is implicitly criticised for the strict functionality of the building itself. -
Remodelling and Rehabilitation of the Tuberculosis Dispensary as a Primary Healthcare Centre
Mario Luis Corea Aiello, Francisco Gallardo-Bravo, Edgardo Mannino
The building of the central anti-tuberculosis dispensary in Barcelona is one of the most representative works of Catalonia’s rationalist architecture in the pre-war period and constitutes a piece of exceptional architectural interest. The building presented – after more than fifty years of use – the typical deterioration of a construction that has been able to respond to the evolution of functional requirements, based on successive specific interventions following the style of the intervened architecture. When we assumed the intervention commitment, we knew that the building was the master and that it would provide us with all the answers, both in terms of a new functional program, as well as the constructive ones referring to the restoration of its pathologies and the incorporation of new facilities. It was also the building itself that gave us the formal keys for the recovery of the garden located in the central courtyard of the original perimeter fence, of the colour scheme both outside and inside the building, the resolution of the new façade. The process began with a 'deconstruction' of the building, following the different typologies that it presented and certain sectors of the slabs began to be recovered. Existing facilities were changed. The adaptation process to the new functional programs was easy, since the building needed few modifications to accommodate the new requirements. Another issue to which we gave special importance was the recovery of the original colours, which is why a methodical investigation was carried out using samples processed in the laboratory. Finally, the original lateral façade was recovered because an annex body was demolished. The intervention always tries to respect the work as much as possible, so that its modernisation and refurbishment does not represent, as far as possible, formal or spatial repercussions for the work.
Archive
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Drawing
Perspectiva del Dispensari Antituberculós.
Arxiu Històric del COAC