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.

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.