Aim: to recover the immense archive from the School of Architecture

Original article by ANTONI RIBAS TUR

The wealth of the collections of the Gaudí Chair and of the library and archives of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) is staggering: it comprises 147,012 items including drawings, plans, photographs, documents, objects and an old bibliography, from the 18^th century to the present day. Most notable and most renowned out of this enormous number of materials, are fifty drawings from Antoni Gaudí’s student era, and the academic works of other distinguished names such as Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Josep Maria Jujol and Josep Torres Clavé. In the case of Jujol, drawings from the period during which he was a drawing professor in the school have also been preserved. Unfortunately, the “economic shortages” are also overwhelming, says the director of the Gaudí Chair, Juan José Lahuerta, and hinder the potential of this collection. Of all the collections, an inventory has been made of only 18%, and a mere 11% has been digitalized. “It is a largely unknown archive. It is inaccessible because until now, it had not been catalogued in its entirety, and there are practically no resources of any type –explains Lahuerta-. Gaudí generates hundreds of thousands of Euro, and yet, the other extreme is that there are collections that would be extraordinary for the country, some of the largest collections in the world, and they have literally been abandoned”.

Juan José Lahuerta has once again brought attention to the importance of the heritage of the School of Architecture through his presentation to the media and the academic community of the plan for the future Digital Gaudí Archive, which seeks to make all these materials accessible to scholars and the general public. “There are collections that go far beyond the surprises that we may find, in which I don’t believe, and the great names, in whom I believe even less”, states Lahuerta, who assumed the role of director of the Gaudí Chair in November 2016. It was then that he implemented an “action plan” to create “a map” of the collection before beginning to take an inventory of it and catalogue it. He left the restoration of any materials in need of work for later. The budget allocated to carry out this task was 50,000 Euro: “a pittance”, as Lahuerta says. However, only a quarter was obtained: the sum of 12,500 Euro from La Caixa bank, obtained through mediation with the UPC and the general research management of the Catalan Government, and 6,000 Euro directly from the UPC. The situation is at its limit. “Does the school want the Gaudí Chair or not?” Lahuerta asks.

 

The Chair reaches museums

In the institutional sphere at least, Lahuerta has found short-term allies. It is anticipated that very soon it will be made public which museum in Barcelona city, which Lahuerta does not reveal, will receive a reserve collection of drawings from the Chair and will collaborate in their restoration, and negotiations are continuing to give another reserve collection to the MNAC. Both initiatives will contribute towards lessening, according to Lahuerta, “the undeserved abandonment” of collections of an “extraordinary value”. In this regard, the director calls for commitment from the public institutions. For Lahuerta, tourism exploitation has turned Gaudí into “the greatest business in the city of Barcelona” and in an “object to be consumed”, and the idea that he was a “lone genius” has been reinforced. In this regard, another of the milestones that would be achieved with the development of the Digital Gaudí Archive would be to promote “another vision” of the author of La Pedrera that is not “economic”, but rather from the perspective of knowledge and within the context of the Barcelona of his time. “The whole archive goes far beyond Gaudí and provides a much clearer, more complete and in-depth vision of architecture studies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and of the construction of Barcelona –says Lahuerta-. The scarce number of PhD theses generated by Gaudí is remarkable. This archive generates very few, and these could open up in infinite directions”.

Among the oldest materials in the archive, there are survey maps and old cartography dated between 1751 and 1904, from the Llotja School, and academic material dating back to the foundation of ETSAB in 1871. As regards personal collections, the archive contains those of architects such as August Font Carrera, Bonaventura Pollés Vivó, Josep Fradera Botey, Josep Domènech i Estapà and Josep Domènech Mansana, and architectural photographs by Antoni Esplugas Puig. Although the collection is given the name Gaudí, it is a “collective archive” in which many unknown names also appear. “There are extraordinary projects by architects who subsequently did not create any notable work but they did so in the academic context and without any other limitation but their own imagination”, says Lahuerta. The work presented yesterday was performed by a very small team: the director himself; the scientific coordinator of the Gaudí Chair, Carmen Rodríguez; the library manager of the ETSAB, Neus Vilaplana, and four students who collaborated between July and December 2017.

The next collection they will tackle is the legacy of Josep Bayó, the building contractor for La Pedrera, among other buildings. “We opened one of the boxes and we found a plan signed by the architect Antoni Puig i Gairalt [architect of the Myrurgia factory]”, explains Lahuerta. Another of the pending questions is the potential inclusion of patrimonial collections from ETSAB in the future Architecture Museum: “I don’t think they will be part of it. This is an archive, not a museum”, says Lahuerta.

 

 

Preserving Gaudí since 1956

The Gaudí Chair of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia has witnessed all the stages of recognition of the architect, from when he was barely known to his current status as a global icon who attracts crowds of tourists. The Chair was founded in 1956 by ministerial order and the first director was the biographer of the architect, Joan Francesc Ràfols, who was later replaced by Josep Maria Sostres. The third director, the architect Joan Bassegoda i Nonell, deemed one of the Gaudí greats, was in charge from 1968 to 2000. The current director, Juan José Lahuerta, succeeds his colleague Jaume Sanmartí, and his previous milestones include the large Gaudí Year exhibition and the renovation of the 19^th and 20^th-century art collection in the MNAC, where architecture and Gaudí have prominent roles. For the past two years, the Gaudí Chair has not been the only academic institution dedicated to the architect in Catalonia: in 2016, the Barcelona University and The Gaudí Research Institute created another Chair, via which several international conferences have been organised with a view to heading global research about the figure of the architect of the Sagrada Familia.