What will be done with the Raval tuberculosis clinic?

BarcelonaThe bitter controversy that pitted Ada Colau's Barcelona City Council against the MACBA over the location of the museum's extension has long been history. Work has already begun on both the museum's expansion in the Convent of the Angels and the new CAP Raval Nord in the Chapel of Mercy, initially ceded to the MACBA. However, the future uses of the current CAP Lluís Sayé, located in the former tuberculosis dispensary designed by Josep Lluís Sert, Joan Baptista Subirana, and Josep Torres Clavé, all founders of GATCPAC, have not been fully resolved. Initially, the idea was to give it cultural uses linked to the MACBA itself.

For now, the construction of the new CAP Raval Nord is expected to be completed in 2026, so it's getting closer to deciding what use the dispensary will be given. However, progress is being made: according to ARA, the building will continue to be linked to Salut. Sources from the Barcelona Health Consortium, to which the building is affiliated, affirm that the building will continue to have "healthcare uses," although not for healthcare purposes, and that they are working on a new use plan for approval. "The forecast is that the healthcare activity currently carried out in this building will move to the new building located in the Chapel of Mercy in early 2027," the same sources explain. "Currently, the Department of Health plans for the facility located in Passage Sant Bernat to continue to have healthcare uses, although the functional plan is being drawn up."

Two photographers committed to the future of the building

The dispensary is one of the most emblematic buildings of Rationalism in Catalonia and is listed as a Cultural Asset of National Interest (BCIN). The dispute between Barcelona City Council, the MACBA (National Council of Catalonia), and the Department of Health over the location of the Raval Nord CAP (Center for Health and Human Services) brought to light complaints from doctors and users about the dispensary's shortcomings, which they had to endure every day, such as doors that were too narrow for wheelchairs to fit through. Since the dispensary is a listed building, certain renovations cannot be carried out. The building's structure is metallic, the enclosures are made of iron frames and cobblestone walls, and the roof is made of fiber cement. These are experimental materials that have not aged particularly well and are sometimes difficult to replace. Therefore, updating the building could, if not done carefully, alter its image.

But all this has a restorative effect: the fact that the dispensary is the protagonist of the exhibition by photographers Jorge Ribalta and Gregori Civera at the Àngels Barcelona gallery (Pintor Fortuny street, 27, on display until May 24), entitled Matter Fever. Approaches to the Raval Antituberculosis Clinic, Barcelona"We want the exhibition to serve as a space for public debate on the future of the building," says Ribalta. "It seemed perverse to me to create this opposition between two public services, as if culture and health had to compete. I even found it demagogic that a left-wing government would use the museum to oppose a Primary Care Center." The dispensary is very fragile, very delicate, Ribalta continues. "If it is deprived of its daily use, it will very quickly become a ruin. Giving a cultural use to a building like this seems absurd to me. My position is to defend that the heritage use of this building, in a low-income neighborhood like Raval, precisely depends on preserving it as a building for healthcare purposes." The dispensary's age

Jorge Ribalta and Gregori Civera have been friends for years, and Civera was one of the photographers selected by Ribalta for the exhibition about Barcelona framed in the Pla de Barris that could be seen at the Macba until January, An unknown city under the fog. New images of Barcelona's neighborhoods.Civera first photographed the dispensary in 1993, fresh from his graduation, for a monograph for architect Antonio Pizza, and also followed the construction of the MACBA (National Museum of Fine Arts), which began two years later. He photographed the dispensary again last year, to mark the building's change of use. As for Ribalta, he photographed the dispensary during maintenance work carried out in 2016, but didn't make the prints. When he learned that Civera had returned to the building, he suggested a dialogue between their works. They both work with analog photography. And for both, looking back, the dispensary is "the beginning of a long process of refurbishment of the Raval that would be decisive, especially from the 1980s onwards, the regenerative impulse or healing which still persists today." They also consider the renovation of the area around Plaza dels Àngels, which began at the end of 2024 and will continue until 2027, as a continuation and culmination of the axis "From High School to Seminary".

A common feature in both images, although Ribalta's are in black and white and Civera's in color, is the interest in the dispensary's large windows, as an example of the project's hygienic zeal. "Hygiene, ventilation, all the themes related to light and ventilation are fundamental in this building and also greatly define the program of modern architecture," Civera points out. They also share the "lack of idealization" of the building's image, as Ribalta says, in a time of overproduction of images, renders and AI-generated images.

A landmark of Barcelona's Macià Plan

The building is made up of two parallel bodies oriented east to west and arranged in an L-shaped layout, as detailed in a text by Maurici Pla published on the COAC's Catalan architecture website. The entrance is located in a semi-public garden that provides direct access to both bodies. The north-facing block houses the consulting rooms, laboratories, and archives. The conference room is located at the rear of the site, and the library is located on the upper floors. "The layout of all the rooms, the circulation system and the treatment of the facades respond to a rigorous adherence to the program and the solar abacus, regardless of the constraints of the site. It is a model of insertion of the concepts of rationalism within a fabric that is not taken into account, and which is implicitly criticized by the

The origin of the dispensary dates back to the desire of the Department of Health and Social Assistance of the Republican Generalitat to combat "the harsh health and social conditions" derived from the industrial development that Barcelona had begun to experience at the beginning of the 19th century and that had caused a "progressive increase in tuberculosis cases." Sert, Subirana and Torres Clavé, the founders of GATCPAC, received the commission in 1934, and the works were completed in 1938. The reason why the building was located in the Raval is that one of the objectives of the Macià Plan was "to sanitize by sponging the most degraded interiors of the island" architect and researcher Xavier Llobet on the same website.

On the other hand, before Ribalta and Civera, another artist, Domenec, addressed the hygienic impact that the dispensary had in a work evocative of the death of the poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit from tuberculosis in 1924, entitled Interruptions. 10 years, 1,340 meters. The work consists of a table on which hang two wooden models: one of the house on Argenteria Street where Salvat-Papasseit died, and the other of the dispensary. The distance between them, which Domenec describes as a "fissure," is charged with meaning: "This 10-year gap between the poet's death and the hospital's arrival becomes a tragic metaphor for the distance between desires and dreams and the always precarious possibility of making them a reality," the artist says.