In order to provide enough hotel accommodation for the Universal Exhibition of 1888, Barcelona City Council called a competition to build a large, temporary hotel, which was awarded to the developer Ricard Valentí, with a design by Domènech i Montaner. The Hotel Internacional did not present any great aesthetic innovations, but it aroused much admiration for the speed of execution: 53 days to finish the structure and a total of 83 days to have the building completed. Domènech devised a serial construction in order to meet the established deadlines. The building had a rectangular ground plan, measuring 150 m by 35 m, with a central symmetrical axis and projecting bodies at both ends and in the central part. It had five storeys in the elongated bodies and six in the central body and in the towers. It had a lift, access doors for pedestrians and cars, café, restaurant, shirt and glove shop, tobacconist's shop, telegraph, courtyard of honour and large skylights that illuminated the corridors. It could serve 2,000 guests, with 600 rooms and 30 flats for families. In order to build on such unstable ground as the embankment formed by the demolition of the wall by the sea, where conventional foundations would have been very costly and slow to lay, an ingenious system was used. It consisted of a grid of metal beams (which were actually rented train rails that could be recovered once the building had been demolished after the exhibition) on which inverted flat brick vaults rested, creating a continuous foundation slab. All the walls were made of brick masonry, with the spaces sized according to the size of the garment to minimise cuts in the ceramics. To speed up construction, work was carried out 24 hours a day, with the workers working in shifts and divided into specialisations. During the night shift, electric lighting was used, which aroused admiration at the time. A modern work structure in which Bonaventura Pollés i Vivó and the recently qualified Josep Forteza i Ubach acted as assistant architects. The work included decorative stucco work based on drawings by Alexandre de Riquer, Joan Llimona and Dionís Baixeras, ornamental mouldings, wallpapering of the interiors... The painting was done by the Bassegoda company, and the decoration by Saumell i Vilaró. The decorative ensemble aimed to achieve the difficult synthesis of a national and modern architecture, as Domènech had determined in his article ‘In search of a national architecture’. There are clear medieval references, but it also retains some academic touches and, at the same time, an Art Nouveau air. Once the exhibition was over, despite the promoter's requests to preserve it, the building was demolished.