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Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.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.
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.
Located in the Eixample district, Pich i Pon House occupies half of the block formed by Plaça Catalunya, Rambla Catalunya, Gran Via and Passeig de Gràcia.
It is a building between partitions, mostly offices but there are also apartments. With an irregular plan, it responds to the general idea of arranging the square projected by Puig i Cadafalch. The building, together with the one on the right side, make up the north façade of Plaça Catalunya, which has great civic significance for being the end of the perspective from the Rambla.
It is organised through a single communal staircase, with integrated open sky, which gives access to the flats and offices. It consists of a ground floor, a mezzanine and six floors, the last of which is removed from the façade plan.
Despite not following the formal guidelines for the configuration of the façades of the traditional residential buildings of the area, the building follows the classic scheme of division into three horizontal strips adapted to the needs of the administrative use of the time. The base is made up of the ground floor and the mezzanine (united in double-height openings) and is delimited by the line that forms the balustrades of the balconies on the first floor.
The five floors make up the intermediate area of the building. This strip has large square openings that reflect the modern spirit of the time. To adapt these typical proportions of offices to a domestic use, those openings corresponding to homes are subdivided into two or three windows separated by columns. For its part, the sixth floor, withdrawn from the façade plan, served as the property's residence.
The chamfer is emphasised by the appearance of a curved balcony with balustrade on the fifth floor and the differentiated treatment of its two vertices. These are notable both for the blind walls between the first and fourth floors and three narrow openings on the fifth floor and for the two crowning temples that are the true protagonists of the building.
The roofs are flat, including that of the removed attic. Its most striking elements are the balusters that dominate all the perimeters that face the square.
Artistically, the two temples of the vertices should be noted. They are of two heights above the attic, profusely decorated with Ionic columns and consist of a blind base, a level with four semicircular arches flanked by Ionic arches and the last level formalised as a circular gazebo resting on eight Ionic columns and topped by a translucent spherical dome. Above each of them, a male figure of the god Mercury emerges.
Regarding the type of composition, regular and symmetrical, and the style of the decorations, the building is considered to be Noucentista. Even though this stylistic categorisation begins to be noted, there are some incipient rationalist traits in its composition, in the treatment of the intermediate floors with perfectly square openings lacking decorations.
Ultimately, Puig i Cadafalch makes use of new construction technologies to form a structure of girders and pillars, to leave the floors free for offices, simulating modern American commercial buildings. The façade presents stuccoed and smooth facings, and the composition of full and empty spaces, of classic lines, with an ornamental concentration evident in the formalisation of the wide openings of the ground floor, which recede with respect to the undulation of the arches and the style of Louis Henry Sullivan. At the entrance door we find one of the characteristics that define this era of the architect: the horror vacui, represented in the columns, the broken pediment and the vases of abundance. In addition, Puig crowned the chamfer of the building with three double-height temples with Ionic columns, covered with a hemispherical cupule presided over by the figure of the god Hermes (symbol of commerce and business). In 1982, the building was the subject of a restoration by the architect Jordi Romeu.
In 1916, Joan Pich i Pon (Barcelona, 1878 - Paris, 1937), mayor of Barcelona and governor of Catalonia, bought the Narcís Pla House, the work of the architect Francesc de Paula de Villar i Lozano (Murcia, 1828 - t. 1852 - Barcelona, 1902), built in 1875 and of which the architect Josep Vilaseca i Casanovas (Barcelona, 1848 - t. 1872 - 1910) had made some modifications and extensions. Pich decides to demolish the old building, owned by the Batlló family, and in 1921 commissions the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch to build a new six-storey house to house offices and with an attic and a mezzanine for his residence.
The volume and overall appearance of the building responds to the general planning idea that Puig i Cadafalch had for the future Plaça Catalunya and which was developed in different projects from 1918. So, the house was designed following the same volume of height and proportions of the neighbouring Gran Hotel Colon, renovated between 1916 and 1918 by Enric Sagnier, to create a unified image in the square.
The current building is crowned by two small temples, but initially there were three. They survived the demolition of the neighbouring building after the end of the Civil War, but shortly after the Banco Español de Crédito building was erected in the 40s, the temple next to the central tower of the new bank building disappeared. At the beginning of the 60s, without it having been possible for us to specify the exact date or year, the two small temples on the corner with Rambla de Catalunya were also dismantled and suddenly disappeared from the roofs.
After democracy was restored, the two small temples on the corner with Rambla de Catalunya were conveniently restored and put in their place in 1982 by the architect Jordi Romeu. But the third temple, which in fact rubbed against the central body of the neighbouring building of the Banco Español de Crédito and had caused it to lose its slenderness, was never restored.