A tour of the vast archives of the Barcelona School of Architecture

BarcelonaAntoni Gaudí wasn't afraid of his final exam: he submitted a project for a circular auditorium, even though he knew that Elies Rogent, the director of the School of Architecture, then located in the historic building of the University of Barcelona (UB), was on the panel. Rogent was the designer of the UB auditorium, which was designed in a completely different way, with a longitudinal nave located in the heart of the building. All of this is reflected in the exhibition. Transhistorical Pedagogies: 150 Years of the Barcelona School of Architecture, which can be seen from this Thursday until September at the Barcelona headquarters of the College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC) and serves to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB). The grade Gaudí obtained went down in history: he passed by the minimum and passed by the minimum of an architect "like a genius or a madman."

Gaudí's most brilliant disciple, Josep Maria Jujol, was also daring. y Montaner, although Jujol did not have him as a teacher. Decades later, Enric Miralles was more transgressive: he broke the rules by presenting the project with another student, Marcià Codinachs, and with drawings at an unusual scale, 1:50, instead of 1:200. But above all, he was transgressive. The big house, the title of the project, which was rated five. "They are fragments of architecture that are inside a large house that has no walls, because the walls are the limit of the paper. So everything drawn inside the sheet is architecture, and that's why he says it." The big house. "Cut the paper along the facade line, and you are always inside, you can't leave because there are no elevations, it's a pure interior space," explains Carolina B. García Estévez, curator of the exhibition along with fellow architects Enric Granell and Andrea Palomino de la Fuente.

The three drawings form the holy of holies of the exhibition, as the curators say. And for García, Jujol, and Miralles, what they have in common is working on projects through "fragments" that they assemble and disassemble.

The exhibition is the first major exhibition on the ETSAB since the centenary, which took place at the Palau Nacional in 1975. It includes around 120 works, around twenty of them drawings and plans, dating from the years of Modernism to pre-Olympic Barcelona. All this falls far short: considering the importance of the ETSAB and the wealth of its collection (240,000 items), Transhistorical pedagogies It once again underscores the fact that the country's public administrations, in the absence of a monographic facility, do not do justice to architecture, neither its heritage nor its present-day architecture.

After the Museum of Architecture and Urbanism project was shelved a few years ago, some facilities hold exhibitions sporadically, but there is still no firm and ongoing policy of dissemination, research, and publications at all levels, from the most informative to the most specialized. Institutions such as the ETSAB itself or the COAC have heritage, as do the professionals themselves. And universities have intellectuals. Considering the importance of architecture in the country, and that it is one of Barcelona's main attractions, why don't museums and the sector form more alliances? The former headquarters of the Gustavo Gili publishing house is planned to host exhibitions coinciding with Barcelona's status as World Capital of Architecture in 2026, but it remains to be seen what will happen next.

Ideas that resonate in different times

The history of the ETSAB dates back to 1875 with the creation of the Barcelona Provincial School of Architecture, directed by Rogent, in a context in which future architects and master builders competed for professional titles. You can see some drawings by a master builder, but the exhibition's thesis is not chronological; rather, the curators have gleaned "reflections, rhymes" from different eras, as Enric Granell says, and made them converse. To begin with, two of the dialogues proposed by the curators are those of a photograph of the lost door of the Graner villa, also by Gaudí, with that of a ruin of the Roman villa in Centelles, and a drawing of two roosters by Jujol with the deteriorated glass negative of a photograph of the cathedral, the arabesque brushstrokes of the drawing.

The materials from different periods are linked by constant themes such as the teaching of architecture through copying, and the importance of pioneering scientific excursions to monumental sites, including the Seu de Urgell Cathedral, Santa María de Poblet, and Tortosa Cathedral. "It was the magical moment when photography began to be incorporated into the field of architecture and, therefore, allowed them to document and map everything they saw," say the curators, who are exhibiting the foundational books by John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc. The stones of Venice and Entretiens sur la architecture, respectively.

Further on, there are two plans of a monumental bridge by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, and the tour continues with a recollection of the renowned architects who passed through the school as guests, to give talks that were always packed, including Richard Neutra, Hans Hollein, Josep Lluís Sert, Alvaro Siza. The exhibition also features magazines and books published by professors and lecturers at the school, such as Rafael Moneo, Xavier Rubert de Ventós and Joan Margarit, and also offers a reflection on the role that these same architects have played in the urban transformation of Barcelona through major events, from the Universal Exposition of 1888 to the current Olympic Games, the latter hosted by Coderch in 1984, just as Barcelona's bid was being cooked up.