Before reading, take a good look at the photograph. It is a chapel. It is above the (already disused) girls’ dormitories of the Ramon Llull Student Residence, one of the different brick buildings that make up the Escola Industrial complex. The boys’ rooms were one floor below. It seems that the border between both floors was not very clear to everyone, so having a stair shot a place to atone for episodic breaches of the sixth commandment it seems comfortable and practical, even very Catalan, one might add. But, it is not to insist, take a good look at the photograph. Do you see something familiar in those catenary arches, something typical of ‘Gaudinian lysergy’? They are well on their way. It is not a work of Gaudí. It belongs to one of his most controversial disciples, Joan Rubió Bellver, one of whose works is one of the most photographed in the city. It’s not this one in the picture, because visits to this chapel are administered with a droppera nonsense that, behold the sweet tooth, will soon come to an end.
This is, be warned before proceeding, a switchback story, so don’t go off the road on any bends. Captain the expedition Eloi Juvillaarchitect to whom we must thank infinitely for the information provided.
First, Rubio Bellver. He was Gaudí’s assistant in some of his civil projects, Casa Calvet, for example, but in the history of Barcelona he has a shameful paragraph because he was the architect who in 1928 wanted to put his particular icing on the monumental process of gotification of the city center . That year, when the aesthetic currents in Europe were radically different, Rubio Bellver I plant a bridge with Venetian inspirations or a representation of Don Juan Tenorio in the middle of Calle del Bisbe. The noise after its inauguration was thunderous. Le Corbusier, on a visit to Barcelona in the company of several professional colleagues, passed under him speechless as a Harpo, but hours later, in a ‘petit committee’, he asked who was to blame for that “rotten egg”.
The bridge is today an almost obligatory photo for all the tourists who pass through that street. It seems that they even like it. poor things
The point is that Rubió Bellver was a benchmark in the first third of the 20th century and, when Josep Puig i Cadafalch assumed the presidency of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya, he turned to him to refound the old Batlló spinning factory on Calle de Urgell. Here comes a zigzag. Point and aside, then.
The Batllo, a family with roots in Olot, settled in Barcelona with an admirable entrepreneurial spirit. With the Eixample still a wasteland, cthey bought the equivalent of four apples (between the streets of Rossellón, Urgell, Paris and Viladomat, an area very well stocked with water mines) to build a textile factory that was going to be the envy of the competition. The entire production process would be carried out in a single location. They hired none other than Rafael Guastavino as master builder and he, adored years later as a true genius in the United States, went to take notes in Europe, to Manchester, for example. He came back with ingenious ideas, but, above all, he put his accent on the project and built in 1885 an area of looms with their characteristic vaulted domes, which were really very beautiful, although, yes, inversely proportional to the ugliness of what was there. It happened daily low-paid child and female labor. La Rosa de Fuego was a bad place for this type of laboricide. Nowadays not anymore, So, yes. The factory survived only 19 years.
Guastavinojust to make a brief point, left its mark on the Batlló factory and raced across the Atlantic after leaving behind a pyramid scheme who ruined many ($40,000 they say he amassed thanks to the unwary) and, also, quite a few heartbroken womenbecause just as an arch of tiles without centering or anything raised you, a sentimental relationship that seemed solid but was not.
The thing is that all that architecture, of which we must not fail to highlight that 64-meter-high chimney that in the subsoil is a labyrinth of corridors almost like a movie, had no clear purpose after the Batlló goodbye, so that could have been demolished. During the Cuban War it was a field hospital for what was left of the soldiers when they returned by ship to Barcelona, but that was temporary. The enclosure deserved a destiny and everything was uncertain. Until, In a dazzling moment, the Mancomunitat de Catalunya arose almost out of nowherea kind of white-label Generalitat that, at the moment of truth, proportionally, seen its media, did much more for this country than 23 years of Pujolism.
Enric Prat de la Riba processed the purchase of that factory because he sensed the need to create a university of trades, a place to train technicians that Catalonia lacked. Not a single wall was demolished. On the contrary, constructions were added. For example, the School of Agriculture was built (in other words, the building that today houses the chapel, now, we are approaching it…), with the purpose, moreover, that one day it would be an annex to the future Ministry of Agriculture. ‘Agriculture. Primo de Rivera’s coup was, of course, something that did not fit into the Mancomunitat’s plans. The life of that place, however, did not decline. So powerful was the project underway that not even a petty dictator like that one dared to dismantle it.
In 1929 the student residence at the beginning of everything mentioned was inaugurated and, in its upper area, the Rubió Bellver chapel, which is accessed through a staircase illuminated by three stained glass windows of ecclesial airs that deserve, to be presented, a zigzag of aúpa.
10,300 kilometers from Barcelona, in the Mekong delta, stands one of the main temples of Caodaism. It is quite out of the way, but if you have the opportunity to visit it, you should never disdain that option. Caodaism is a rather rare religion, if not the rarest, and that the competition is very close when it comes to faith in the unprovable. The fact is that inside that temple they have figures of what they consider their own saints. Jesus, Muhammad, Victor Hugo, Lenin, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc…
It is unavoidable to remember that repoquer of figures when, in the student residence of the Escola Industrial, one climbs the stairs on the way to the chapel and one finds that the sunlight passes through the colored crystals that give shape to Ramon Llull, Jaume Balmes and Narcís Monturiol. These stained glass windows, of course, are not part of the sacred enclosure, but in their own way they predispose the soul to what will be discovered behind the doors of this more or less small center of worship.
That Rubió Bellver is known for the bridge on Calle del Bisbe and not for this work is nonsense that is very typical of this city.
The great fortune is that the Barcelona Provincial Council, owner of the place and still somewhat imbued by what was once the Mancomunitat, has very interesting plans for the future.
Last March, the ‘dipu’ publicly presented some works budgeted at 100 million euros that aim to give a new life (the third?, the fourth already?) to the entire enclosure so that for the people of Barcelona it is a new ‘superilla’, green and passable, and that from the academic point of view it is a pole for attracting international talent. This is where the student residence will come into play, which, given the prohibitive real estate market in the city, will be an essential piece for the wheel of talent to start turning. The project plans to recover even the Guastavino domes as they were 137 years ago, but the logical question is what will become of the chapel, with its unusual sgraffito that decorates the juros directly on the bricks?
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Zig Zag. From time to time, Barcelona’s Mare Nostrum supercomputer appears in the media, not because of its brutal programming performance, but because of what is its home, a chapel built in 1859 by Manuel Girona in the Pedralbes neighborhood. It is difficult to find a qualifier for this brutal contrast. Divine? The fact is that, inspired or not by that precedent, the chapel of Rubió Bellver is called to be a place of intellectual ‘coworking’ Which is sure to be inspiring. Photogenic, too.
Before it will be necessary to desacralize the enclosure. From these lines, since we are, we ask to be present on that day. We remain awaiting a response.