Intro

About

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Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.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.

Aureli Mora i Omar Ornaque
Directors arquitecturacatalana.cat

credits

About us

Project by:

Created by:

Directors:

2019-2024 Aureli Mora i Omar Ornaque

Documental Commission:

2019-2024 Ramon Faura Carolina B. Garcia Eduard Callís Francesc Rafat Pau Albert Antoni López Daufí Joan Falgueras Mercè Bosch Jaume Farreny Anton Pàmies Juan Manuel Zaguirre Josep Ferrando Fernando Marzá Moisés Puente Aureli Mora Omar Ornaque

Collaborators:

2019-2024 Lluis Andreu Sergi Ballester Maria Jesús Quintero Lucía M. Villodres Montse Viu

External Collaborators:

2019-2024 Helena Cepeda Inès Martinel

With the support of:

Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de Cultura

Collaborating Entities:

ArquinFAD

 

Fundació Mies van der Rohe

 

Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico

 

Basílica de la Sagrada Família

 

Museu del Disseny de Barcelona

 

Fomento

 

AMB

 

EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona

 

IEFC

 

Fundació Domènench Montaner.

Design & Development:

edittio Nubilum
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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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Informació bàsica de protecció de dades

Responsable del tractament: Col·legi d Arquitectes de Catalunya 'COAC'
Finalitat del tractament: Tramitar la sol·licitud de còpies digitals dels documents dels quals l’Arxiu Històric del COAC gestiona els drets d'explotació dels autors, a més d'aquells que es trobin en domini públic.
Legitimació del tractament: El seu consentiment per tractar les seves dades personals.
Destinatari de cessions o transferències: El COAC no realitza cessions o transferències internacionals de dades personals.
Drets de les persones interessades: Accedir, rectificar i suprimir les seves dades, així com, l’exercici d’altres drets conforme a l’establert a la informació addicional.
Informació addicional: Pot consultar la informació addicional i detallada sobre protecció de dades en aquest enllaç

How to get there

In Pictures

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

  • Intervention in Park Güell

Memory

Refurbishment of the Hypostyle Hall, the square and the perimeter bench.

Park Güell was a real estate operation of 60 houses for the Barcelona bourgeoisie that failed, and in 1922 the city council bought it and turned it into a public park.

The park has never seen its architecture change. Since the 20s, there have only been some punctual repairs and touch-ups. The vegetation has changed and grown, and that sparse and stony image of slopes and ravines is no longer offered to the eye; immobile and permanent vegetation, pruned into stone. An architectural and abstract garden of a rocky nature; a sculpted bare mountain with stone vegetation quarry.

The Hypostyle Room is a Greek-style temple with exaggerated Doric capitals and with a dented ceiling with little domes. It supports a dirt square with a wavy edging-bench; a border of acroteria of wave crests with encrusted crustaceans that bring the sea from the horizon closer to the bare mountain.

Restoration works of the Hypostyle Hall and the square.

Repair of structural elements in poor condition; waterproofing of the roof, and construction of an efficient drainage system; reconstruction of artificial stone coverings of column shafts, capitals and architrave; replacement of tiles on lintels, domes and perimeter bench.

Author: Martínez Lapeña-Torres Arquitectos

The park has never seen its architecture change. Since the 20s, there have only been some occasional repairs and touch-ups. The vegetation has changed. Both the trees and the bushes have grown, and the stony image of slopes and ravines is no longer visible. But what has changed the most have been the visitors. Now they no longer think they are facing a capricious extravagance, but a work of worship, an almost religious space.

The static and permanent vegetation is pruned in stone. We are in front of an architectural and abstract garden.
The vision of nature is rocky: a bare, sculpted mountain, quarry of stony vegetation.
Today we see the park as a forest with buildings, with elevated paths on pseudo-Gothic naves. But yesterday the landscape was a garden of rocks, with vegetation sculpted with a mallet and chisel.

Hypostyle Room
The pointed columns with exaggerated capitals supporting a bulging surface that doesn’t seem right... like a Greek or an Egyptian temple.
A 'bull' on the surface of the earth, a supported 'plateau', floating in the sea, with a coloured ribbon, a wavy edge, a frieze, a diadem, a 'lace', a headdress... winding in the wind.
When you look at it from an inverted position, towards the valley, you see the cover as if on a sandy seabed, veiled by undulating spirals of white tones, with strange crustaceans from the 8th day of creation, or their calcareous remains, polychromatic parasites, which occupy the place near the capitals. The inner domes mark the white and regular compass of the swell.

The bank
The break (with ceramic painting) of an architrave is a vegetal ornament of acroteria; flowers whose order, seen from the foreshortening, is a disordered mold. The tiles, the coincidences (how much we wanted to get our hands on them and invent; we couldn't).
It is very strange, and therefore curious, an almost literally classical temple with a border of cross stitch like a wave of seaweed tiles, corals, with reflections of crystals like the crests of the waves.
The world of the sea that can be seen from afar, which has approached the mountain in a colourful wave.

-

The project proposes the restoration of the structural elements in poor condition, the waterproofing of the roof, the construction of an effective drainage system and the restoration of the tile coverings of the lintels, dome and perimeter bench.

Structural elements
The refurbishment project proposes redoing the lintel by removing the lower part of it, where the straps were housed, keeping the upper part composed of several layers of bricks with a slightly arched geometry to resist better compression efforts and redoing the reinforcements using bars of steel protected by a bath of resins. The armatures are anchored to the capitals by their concreting with special non-shrinkage mortars that ensure the absence of efforts that could damage the existing factory.
The domes are congruent when they start to ensure their rigidity, isolating their perimeter from the lintel by means of an expansion joint that guarantees the independence of the elements.

Waterproofing
A total waterproofing of the roof is planned using a layer of PVC fabric, prior to which - and directly on the surfaces of the domes and lintels - a coating of 'polireal' has been extended that will act as an impermeable barrier to make possible condensations that may to originate the light filling mass of expanded clay aggregate located between the PVC fabric and the covering factories.

Drainage systems
The original drainage system is restored, although improved with the incorporation of pipes inside the columns. A surface drainage grid is also projected at the lowest point of the square, which will act as an overflow in case a torrential rain can accumulate water on the surface.

Ceramic coating of lintels, domes and perimeter bench
This was the most delicate and difficult intervention.
The perimeter bench is the most valuable part of the park and, at the same time, the one that suffers the most from use and inclement weather.
Its condition before our intervention was very precarious.
The previous restorers chose to place more neutral coloured ceramic pieces: white, blue, green... given the impossibility of reproducing Josep Maria Jujol's original pieces.

As is known, all the ceramics placed in Park Güell came from an industrial landfill that discarded them as defective, due to colour or dimensions, etc.
Because of this fact, the colouration presented by the tiles that we could call white, is very diverse; so white does not in fact exist, they are green, blue, salmon, violet tones, etc. We could differ up to 37 different shades of white in the mosaics of domes and lintels, the same ones that the whites of the perimeter bank must have originally had.
This gave rise to the paradox of having to manufacture up to 37 shades of white identical to the originals to replace some tiles that came from a landfill, discarded as unusable.
To obtain the size and its degradation during placement, plaster casts were made of one of the few remaining original lintels in order to have a life-size model of the mosaic.
The operators spent many days practicing in the placement of the mosaic to obtain satisfactory results and many tests of coatings to give them as definitive.
We must thank them for the complicity, enthusiasm and patience of the foreman and general manager of the Agroman company (Luís García Guillén and Francisco Lamenca) who did not hesitate to put in the necessary means to obtain the best possible result.

Perimeter bank
We decided to replace all the white cladding, which was badly damaged and largely repaired in previous works.
The white mosaic coating had to act as a neutral background, which, once completed, highlighted the original coloured mosaic, of which only the parts in poor condition were replaced that, being standard and industrial designs, we were able to manufacture again with the original molds obtained from Onda's museums.
Another important objective was to restore the original image of the bench in its lumbar cord and crowning of the backrest.
The neutral-coloured rectangular pieces that had been placed in previous restorations were replaced, leaving the original Jujol pieces that had a different geometry, being cut at 45º.
Our intention was to unify the geometry of the pieces with the originals, as well as the intonation of the colors with which they were glazed. Not to reproduce, something impossible, Jujol's drawings and graffiti. Therefore, the pieces freely executed by ceramist Toni Cumella try to harmonise the colour and geometry of the piece and all of them are engraved with the date of the year in which they were made: 1992.
These pieces were also made with stoneware for the reasons already explained.
The existing cracks in the bank must act as expansion joints, which is why their repair is carried out by performing the mosaic coating with an elastic adhesion material that absorbs the deformations of the structure.

Author: Martínez Lapeña-Torres Arquitectos

Authors

How to get there

On the Map

Awarded
Cataloged
Disappeared
All works

Constellation

Chronology

  1. Park Güell

    Antoni Gaudí i Cornet

    Park Güell

    The park is the result of the purchase by Barcelona City Council of the urbanisation of a luxury neighborhood designed by Gaudí and promoted by Eusebi Güell that never came to be. What can currently be visited are the landscaping of sixty undeveloped plots at the foot of Mount Pelada, with magnificent views of Barcelona, and the common parts of the project: the paths, access, market, central square. Gaudí urbanises the mountain with streets that follow the minimum sloping lines and four bridges built with material from the clearing of the plots. The retaining porch walls inside which can be circulated, covered with local stone, are exceptional. Both the bridges and the porch are crowned by unique columns crowned in turn by planters where agaves are planted. The heart of the urbanisation had to be an elevated square that instead of a perimeter railing has a corrugated bench designed and built with prefabricated concrete by his collaborator Josep Maria Jujol, finished with some breakwaters that are worth discovering in detail. Below the square is a hypostyle room that was to house the market, with twisted columns to work with as little effort as possible. The columns are empty and below them is a water tank that should cover the entire park. Some are removed in order to make room for larger stops and are replaced by medallions, also designed by Jujol. The ensemble is accessed by an imperial staircase that has, on the axis of symmetry, a spectacular dragon made of trencadís that has become one of Barcelona’s landmarks. The fence that guards the park at the entrance, finished with two asymmetrical pavilions, is equally remarkable. One of the pavilions currently houses the Gaudí Museum.
  2. Intervention in Park Güell

    Martínez Lapeña-Torres Arquitectos, José Antonio Martínez Lapeña, Elías Torres Tur

    Intervention in Park Güell

    Refurbishment of the Hypostyle Hall, the square and the perimeter bench. Park Güell was a real estate operation of 60 houses for the Barcelona bourgeoisie that failed, and in 1922 the city council bought it and turned it into a public park. The park has never seen its architecture change. Since the 20s, there have only been some punctual repairs and touch-ups. The vegetation has changed and grown, and that sparse and stony image of slopes and ravines is no longer offered to the eye; immobile and permanent vegetation, pruned into stone. An architectural and abstract garden of a rocky nature; a sculpted bare mountain with stone vegetation quarry. The Hypostyle Room is a Greek-style temple with exaggerated Doric capitals and with a dented ceiling with little domes. It supports a dirt square with a wavy edging-bench; a border of acroteria of wave crests with encrusted crustaceans that bring the sea from the horizon closer to the bare mountain. Restoration works of the Hypostyle Hall and the square. Repair of structural elements in poor condition; waterproofing of the roof, and construction of an efficient drainage system; reconstruction of artificial stone coverings of column shafts, capitals and architrave; replacement of tiles on lintels, domes and perimeter bench.
  3. FAD Award

    Finalist. Category: Architecture
  4. Premio Década

    Award-Winner / Winner

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Set Park Güell

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