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.

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.