The building is located on a plot of land between party walls, with the main façade facing Còrsega Street. It integrates a large building within the urban fabric of the Eixample. To achieve this, we have proposed three different types of façades that respond to different conditions of its immediate environment: the façade on Còrsega Street, the façade in the interior of the block and the façades of the hotel's courtyards. The façade is split into two floor plans, one of glass and the other one of ceramic. On the main façade, the openings are carried out with respect to the façade plan by means of brass boxes, creating a game of light and shadow that reduces the screen effect of the building, achieving a better proportion on a city scale. Following the same principle, the two large galleries recall the "skyline" of the old Bayer factory. At night, these boxes are illuminated, achieving the effect that the boxes float on a black canvas. These mechanisms help to divide the longitudinal view of the façade, which occupies almost the entire block. On the ground floor, the double-height metal portico structure helps to build a foundation that seeks the view of the interior garden and gives presence to the building. The façade here is proposed in reverse, this time with the glass set back, reaching a depth of up to 1 m from the base to its crowning. It is a façade that recognises its visual foreshortening and emerges from this condition with the maximum possible advantage, building a façade with thickness, with shadows, which from its complexity in this case allows simplification to integrate into the environment. The rear façade, with joinery also located on the interior floor plan, generates a game of voids and groups the first two floors into a single opening, to obtain greater verticality. The inner courtyards of the hotel take on a special relevance and not only provide ventilation to some simpler rooms, but open to the interior distribution corridors. To solve the possibility of visual interference between corridors and rooms, a skin of vertical metal tubes in the shape of a diamond has been constructed which, like large curtains, solves this problem. At night, lines of hidden LEDs backlit the tubes, offering an image of the suspension of the light metal element in front of its enclosure or patio façades. One of the main challenges has been the industrialisation of the entire construction solution. It is a very light ventilated façade built from large modules of almost 5x3 metres that were finished at the workshop. This solution has had many advantages, including absolute control over its finish and faster assembly. The fact of minimising the number of different materials (black ceramic panel, glass and structure lined with brass) has allowed to simplify not only its formal solution, but also its construction.

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.