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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Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.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.
About us
Project by: 
Created by: 
Directors:
2019-2024 Aureli Mora i Omar OrnaqueDocumental 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 OrnaqueCollaborators:
2019-2024 Lluis Andreu Sergi Ballester Maria Jesús Quintero Lucía M. Villodres Montse ViuExternal Collaborators:
2019-2024 Helena Cepeda Inès MartinelWith the support of:
Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de CulturaCollaborating Entities:
ArquinFADFundació 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.
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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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Esbós del frontó de la façana de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
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- Author:
- Lluís Domènech i Montaner
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- Date:
- 1881 - 1884
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- Type:
- Drawing
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- Fonds / Held by:
- Arxiu Històric del COAC
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Alçat del frontó de la façana de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
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- Author:
- Lluís Domènech i Montaner
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- Date:
- 1881 - 1884
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- Type:
- Drawing
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- Fonds / Held by:
- Arxiu Històric del COAC
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Esbós del coronament del frontó de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
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- Author:
- Lluís Domènech i Montaner
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- Date:
- 1881 - 1884
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- Type:
- Drawing
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- Fonds / Held by:
- Arxiu Històric del COAC
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Memory
The building applies the procedures of industrial architecture to a project with a high degree of fragmentation. The outbuildings of the workshops are located on a semi-underground floor that reaches the bottom of the site. The entrance is highlighted by an octagonal dome that provides overhead light and connects it visually to the office loft. The second section is for the file, set in a U-shape around a central skylight. The complex is made up of a structure of cast iron pillars and beams arranged in well-differentiated sectors, and a brick factory façade with six large, glazed openings. The design of the façade adopts the filigree motifs typical of Islamic architecture, one of the main references of the time. The arrangement of the openings generates numerous visuals in a vertical direction and creates light and space effects that anticipate the interests of modern architecture.
The Montaner i Simon publishing house was founded in 1861 by Ramon Montaner and Francesc Font. In 1879 they commissioned a new building for the publishing house from Domènech i Montaner, Ramon Montaner's nephew, in the heart of the expanding Eixample.
Although it was an industrial building, it was conceived as a mansion between partitions, with a main façade with a central symmetrical axis and the offices in the first bay, while the printing presses and storage shelves were located at the back.
The office area, with a staircase area illuminated by an octagonal firefly, was highly compartmentalised and had a more conventional feel. The industrial area, on the other hand, had a diaphanous floor plan with a structure of cast-iron pillars and exposed metal girders and a central courtyard in the form of an impluvium.
This structure initiated the spatial rationality that would characterise many of his works.
The first proposal for the project, for which planning permission was requested, presented a façade with a fairly academic composition and a pediment at the top, finished with Montjuïc stone. However, the façade was eventually built in exposed brick, and the whole composition took on a much more modern language, combining medieval references with representations of the inventors of printing techniques and great writers.
With the use of exposed brick on the façade, the materials took centre stage not only for their constructive function, but also as decoration. This work also marked the beginning of the pairing of decorative arts and architecture that Domènech was to develop in depth, with the recovery of crafts such as wrought iron, stained glass, ceramics, mosaic, etc.
The family business was in operation until 1952, when it was taken over by another publisher. The building underwent various modifications to its interior to adapt it to the needs of the publishing house. It finally closed in 1981. Since 1990 it has been the headquarters of the Fundació Tàpies.
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Constellation
Chronology (6)
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Montaner i Simón Publishers
The building applies the procedures of industrial architecture to a project with a high degree of fragmentation. The outbuildings of the workshops are located on a semi-underground floor that reaches the bottom of the site. The entrance is highlighted by an octagonal dome that provides overhead light and connects it visually to the office loft. The second section is for the file, set in a U-shape around a central skylight. The complex is made up of a structure of cast iron pillars and beams arranged in well-differentiated sectors, and a brick factory façade with six large, glazed openings. The design of the façade adopts the filigree motifs typical of Islamic architecture, one of the main references of the time. The arrangement of the openings generates numerous visuals in a vertical direction and creates light and space effects that anticipate the interests of modern architecture. -
Rehabilitation of the Editorial Montaner i Simón Building to House the Antoni Tàpies Foundation
B01 Arquitectes, Roser Amadó i Cercós, Lluís Domènech i Girbau
The Montaner i Simó publishing house, belonging to the architect Domènech i Montaner, is the first building in the Eixample to integrate typology and industrial technology in the city centre. Like many buildings in the initial Eixample, the publishing house had a height corresponding to three floors, being boxed with respect to the cornice line of the consolidated Eixample corresponding to five floors. The most important intervention of the project is to solve the effect of the two large partition walls of the neighbouring houses, fully respecting the current state of Domènech i Montaner’s façade which corresponds to a finished building composition. The effort to make the contemporaneity of the action compatible with the respect for the modernist building and the need to solve the problem of the reduced height of the building, suggested the treatment of the upper part of this achieving the profile of the current Eixample based on extending the structure that supports the sloping roof with long beams that support sheets of metal mesh. For this reason, a series of eight semi-transparent panels is created, perpendicular to the façade, which in a foreshortening view hide the partitions and reconstruct the cornice line of the Eixample. This treatment has the advantage that, seen from the front, the edge of the eight sheets practically disappears floating on the façade. This metal set supports the intervention of Antoni Tàpies. Internally, the project tries to exploit the spatial quality of the old publishing house (slender six-metre pillars, arrangement of slabs uneven with respect to street level, and zenithal light). The lighting of the large exhibition halls led to the modification of the existing central skylight and the roof system by creating the typical north-facing shed. This substantial modification produced a unitary roofing solution that combines perfectly with the roof of the library, of which the original structure of wooden hangers and the shelves of the old printing house are preserved. -
FAD Award
Finalist. Category: Architecture - Remodelling and RehabilitationRehabilitation of the Editorial Montaner i Simón Building to House the Antoni Tàpies FoundationB01 Arquitectes, Roser Amadó i Cercós, Lluís Domènech i Girbau
Premio Década
Award-Winner / WinnerRehabilitation of the Editorial Montaner i Simón Building to House the Antoni Tàpies FoundationB01 Arquitectes, Roser Amadó i Cercós, Lluís Domènech i Girbau
Remodelling of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation
Ábalos+Sentkiewicz Arquitectos, Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz
The first objective of the renovation of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation is to open the entire historic building to the public with new exhibition, archive and educational areas, concentrating the administrative areas in a new three-storey pavilion located at the bottom of the plot and with exit to the square’s patio. But the Antoni Tàpies Foundation also aims to contribute to consolidating a new generation of museums understood as centres of cultural production, proposing a multiple spatiality, adapted to the diversity of artistic practices, to the demand for thermodynamic balance, to the enhancement of the inherited heritage and the atmospheric dissolution in favor of the intensification of the visitor’s experience, who is offered to visualise the whole programmatic framework that supports the cultural production and the modernist building itself as part of the exhibition system. In environmental terms, the expansion means a substantial improvement in the natural lighting and the form factor of the original building, included in a single volume that reduces energy exchanges, which has allowed to expand its surface without modifying existing air conditioning systems.FAD Award
Award-Winner / Winner. Category: Interior DesignRemodelling of the Antoni Tàpies FoundationÁbalos+Sentkiewicz Arquitectos, Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz
Archive
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Drawing
Esbós del frontó de la façana de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
Arxiu Històric del COAC
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Drawing
Alçat del frontó de la façana de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
Arxiu Històric del COAC
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Drawing
Esbós del coronament del frontó de l'Editorial Montaner i Simón.
Arxiu Històric del COAC
Audiovisual
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7:35
L’editor, l’editorial i l’arquitecte, per Laura Bellver
Routes (1)
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Rutes 48