The new life of the Corberó House

BarcelonaThe sculptor Xavier Corberó (1935-2017) conceived his home in Esplugues de Llobregat as a "livable sculpture". Thanks to the dozens of concrete arches adorning the facade, Casa Corberó has become an international icon as well. In 2022 the Esplugues de Llobregat City Council bought part of it, the so-called Espai Corberó, for 3 million euros. And now the founders of the architecture studio Mesura and the art gallery Load, Alex Simorré, have bought the other part of the complex, where Corberó's home and workshop are located, with the aim of recovering it while remaining faithful to Corberó's vision.

"This house must be activated with life," states Marcos Parera, founder of Mesura along with Benjamín Iborra, Jaime Font, Carlos Dimas, and Jordi Espinet. "For us, life is the creative engine of what happened in the house –explains Parera–. Corberó lived in that house and, at the same time, shared it a lot: he always invited many artists to sleep there, he never let them go to hotels. It is a house with 39 rooms, and he made an act of hospitality and sharing." So they plan to recover ten of the rooms to transform them "into a place where people can go to sleep and understand that sleeping can also be a creative act, not like in a traditional hotel." On the other hand, they plan for part of the house to be accessible to the public.

They also propose that Casa Corberó once again become a place of creation. Parera recalls that in 1972 Corberó founded the Centre d'Activitats i Investigacions Artístiques de Catalunya (CAIAC) at his home, with a program of creation workshops and a scholarship fund for young creatives, among whom was the jewelry designer Elsa Peretti. "He built the first module of the house with Ricard Bofill, and they hosted 25 artisans from different disciplines. Recovering this essence seems to us a response to how heritage should be managed, giving it life instead of putting it in a display case," says Parera.

Corberó's house and workshop belonged to Corberó's widow and daughter. The amount for which they sold it has not been made public. The process has been long: the new owners became interested three years ago. "When we visited it, we were very impressed by how it was possible that, having lived here all our lives, we didn't even know half of what it was –says Parera–. Moreover, we had mixed ideas about what Corberó had done, because in reality he spent 40 years building that whole life sculpture that makes up 14,000 square meters," he adds. The house had different suitors, and Parera and his partners jumped in after a project to turn it into a hotel fell through. "This project would have destroyed it. That moved us a lot, and from then on we took it seriously. We believed that in this project the world of art and architecture complement each other," concludes Parera.