Last month we featured the Must-See Architecture in Barcelona and hopefully, its got you packing your bags for Catalan’s capital of culture. To spice things up a bit, we’re going to take you on a 4-part series by Spanish photographer David Cardelús highlighting some of the most beautiful heritage buildings in Spain.
For Part III we’re exploring the work of the oft-forgotten Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner and his incredible design for the Saint Pau Hospital.
The following text is provided to us by David Cardelús. Barcelona’s Sant Pau Hospital has been completely renovated to preserve and reveal its minutest architectural and decorative detail and to currently be Europe’s largest Art Nouveau site.
A few blocks away from Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Sant Pau Hospital is one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites since 1997 now completely renovated and accessible to the general public.
The hospital, designed by Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner –an architect contemporary to Antoni Gaudí and also author of the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona– was projected as a city within the city like a sum up of widely spaced colorful pavilions, well ventilated and oriented and surrounded by gardens intended to help the sick to get better sooner.
Photographing Sant Pau Hospital meant giving a very special attention to a daring but also accurate representation of the colors of the buildings, rich and saturated under the bright and crisp autumn and winter sunlight.
As you may know, the Art Nouveau architecture in Catalonia –also known as Modernist– finds its main inspiration in Nature as opposed to the industrial architecture of the mid-XIXth century, thus resulting in buildings with such organic shapes and fantastic colored materials and decorative details.
