Josep Maria Jujol: Five Major Buildings, 1913-1923

by Dennis Dollens

Josep Maria Jujol (1879-1949) created some of Spain's greatest modern buildings in a style known as modernisme (the Barcelona equivalent of art nouveau). In one decade, between 1913 and 1923, the young architect built five works that entitle him to be classified as a pioneer of Modernism; yet Jujol, a collaborator with Antoni Gaudi on some of that master's most admired works, has been largely unrecognized and his independent architecture unknown.
Josep Maria Five Major Buildings places the architect's work in the highly charged religious and political context of Barcelona - from the late 19th century through the Spanish Civil War and on to the time of Jujol's death in 1949. This book considers Jujol's career as parallel to, but not part of, the nascent avant-garde emerging from Barcelona's cafe Els Quatre Gats and the Galleries Dalmau, with which Picasso, Duchamp, Dali, Sert, and Miro were at one time associated.
Josep Maria Five Major Buildings traces the architect's development in this and Gaudi's conservative religious environment, as well as in a broader European frame. It also considers Jujol's use of symbolic, abstract calligraphy, collage, and painting as advanced semiotic elements in an extraordinary amalgamation of craft, material, technique and space fused into visionary architecture.

Genres: Architecture

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1994

Reviews

[d · Rating 5 out of 5]

The architecture of Josep Maria Jujol is an architecture of collage that includes fragments of vision and faith intertwining the person of the architect with his work. [It is mainly characterized by] expressive delight, materiality, creative spatial and decorative manipulations.

When I read about Gaudi back in 2023, I found Jujol mentioned in passing, then I found this book in the library. I made a silent promise to myself and Jujol to read this book and I finally did. It is one of the better-written architecture books I've read in terms of writing, scope, and illustration. With sharp, dense, yet well-composed sentences, Dollens writes about Jujol with so much respect for his mastery and love for his work, as well as being a generally good writer. It shows in the gentle conviction with which he argues for Jujol's merit as separate from and likely causal to Gaudi's. I discovered that many of the elements I love in Gaudi's work, such as Parc Guell's trencadis bench, were made by Jujol. It upset me how little known this fact was. For someone with such significant impact on Catalan modernisme, Jujol is overlooked in conventional architectural history and I am glad to have discovered and learned about him through this. It exists as a contrast to Gaudi's rich documentation and the difference rich patrons made. Jujol's work is geometrically loose yet bold, imbued with the Catholicism which he was persecuted for, and decorated in innovative trencadis and sgrafitti painted by a hand, loving and unfettered, despite the difficult financial circumstances he found himself in. I love how the book incorporated this by using Jujol's calligraphy for the headings and I wish I had a copy of my own.

General Notes:

- "Modernisme kept alive by Jujol after its academically assigned death
produced under distressed artistic and financial circumstances"
- Jujol inspiring Gaudi with Casa Batllo
- protruding broken glass (a Jujolian Device)
- On Casa Batllo: "Jujol’s forging (re: wrought iron) brought not only waves and light fractures, it also brought a churning elemental violence that transforms Gaudi’s sculpted facade into an architecture of animation"
- Subverting simple decoration in favor of cryptic devotions
- Giving to those willing to look and study cryptograms that placed his architectural surfaces not only as screens between rooms and the environment but as permeable membranes between individual users and their spiritual universe.
- Decorations that are non-proselytizing, they speak to nonbelievers as beautiful modulations and ornamentations of surface.
- Architecture of reassembled fractures sutured by cylinders, curves, triangles and tetrahedrons
- Material brilliance and intricate spatial overlappings
- Penchant for triangulated planes, spaces and shapes
- Sgrafitti!
- He had no rich patrons like Gaudi. Limited by the poverty of his clients.

Casa Manach
-Transformation of calligraphy into architectonic elements
-Chair: experimental use of material, fragmented space, and broken and patterned light, from Cathedral of Tarragona mary heart (symbol of Catalan catholicism); Caligari reference

Torre de la Creu
- Built without the hyperbole of manifestos or publicity
- Downward spiral after la Creu
- A possible overshadowing by Gaudi, in whose light Jujol first came to view and against whose blaze he may have seemed an epigone
- Inspired by the church but to the layman, the church was a symbol of repression (allied with landlords, fascists)
- Setmana Tragica: anti-church week
- Solidly structured plan, jagged form
- Architecture of devotion

Can Negre
- The house is a drawn and sculpted vision, where the line is a metaphor leading to myth and mystery, in order to support faith.
- The pantheon of architecture us without saints
- Interesting entrance: tribuna on bird leg stilts then sudden nondescript entrance.
- SCATHING! ….treatment of Can Negre is architectural sacrilege. The decision that lets a great building sit in a bleak plaza bespeaks a lavish poverty of imagination.
- Gorgeous squared-off spiral stairs
- Painting subverts planar regularity
- Circling of the square: effectiveness in imposing curves on the rectilinear

Can Bofarull
- modified but essentially historic, romantic but essentially modern
- repurposing of farming tools and hardware
- Cut and paste heritage
- Roof is another example of Jujol’s trencadis
- Independent but sympathetic relationship between conflicting structures
- Collage hardware
- Architecutral assemblage

Vistabella
- to further and order his architecture according to natural organization
- Geologic testimony
- Coolest altar to Mary ever with vaulting that bursts into flame murals
- A station between love and belief
- Transcend writing for architecture to become both form and message
- Employed special Catalan vaulting system - Guastavino system

Casa Planells
- A structure free of direct quotation
- Orthographic canyons
- No drawings survive and no similar projects followed. “Politics and fashion by 1923 had altered the design and architectural environment Jujol lived in but not the one he designed in, leaving him stranded between programmed neoclassic buildings, modest renovations, and isolated rural commissions.”
- Beautiful columns that swirled into the ceiling.

Santuari de Montserrat
- Begins to illustrate what Jujol would have done with a large structure while at the same time hinting at the frustration, perhaps heartbreak, he must have suffered when project after project met with abandonment
- Invoked the black Virgin of Montserrat and the topography of Catalunya itself (steep, rounded mountains)
- It had the potential to free him from Gaudi but its construction was halted and never continued

Commemorative fountain
- Classically beautiful but familiar
- Cultural romanticism, sycophantic nationalism
- Pompous and awkward heavyhandedness
his work: regressive, allegorical, typical

words: ludic, mirador
phrases: pointillistic iridescence