la Torre dels Ous

You rarely have the opportunity to be able to relate to a building that we could label as a laboratory experiment and close to Barcelona, in a town that was once a small rural enclave that with the arrival of the railroad became a summer resort for the bourgeoisie of In Barcelona, there is this small building of about 500 sqm, with 3 floors above ground and 26 m high. It is a centennial building, completed in 1916, which by its dimensions takes us to that of a medium-sized town, except that it actually housed 2 homes since that was the commission that its promoter entrusted to her nephew, a young and unknown architect who collaborated neither more nor less than with another of the previous generation, Antoni Gaudí who was fortunate to be recommended to a young Count Güell, also in need of an architectural talent to position him in society. A plot located in the highest part of the population and almost bordering the train track was made available for this two-family project that its author solved in an unusual way in an isolated building of an erect but continuous facade and a roof deck in a profusely sculptured way that in turn was and is a strong claim for those who are close to the place. In its interior made by an intersection of circles, the contrast of its two careful stairs, 1 per house, with the respective rooms made in a Spartan way is surprising. Now that we know a little about the architectural object cataloged as a modernist, paying more attention to its construction period, surely it is striking that it has not identified who had the opportunity to conceive this building. No, I have’nt forgotten, this is Josep Maria Jujol, an architect who developed his professional activity when the modernism of the three greats, Puig i Cadafalch, Domènech i Montaner and Antoni Gaudí had reached its zenith, and although as we had said He had a great professional relationship with the latter, his interventions were eclipsed by the stardom of the previous ones and although he also practiced the teaching staff at the School of Architecture, upon the disappearance of the previous ones, he had to live convulsed moments of the last century as the advent of the 1st World War, the Iberian War of 36 and the ostracism of the Franco dictatorship until its death this year marks its seventieth anniversary, one hundred-fortieth of his birth, a fact that has caused his work to return to the light and be recognized and at the same time highlight something very common in most Catalan talents who are hindered his career by a partner well-off age that turns its back on them and at the same time certifies that it either does not go with them or that their presence is wrong and that life must be sought elsewhere. I must say that when I studied architecture in Barcelona, especially in my early years, they told me about much more distant references in location but closer to that with the intellectual current of contemporary architecture since modernism was outdated, perhaps because its relationship with a more Catalan identification that should not be agreed. Well, whatever it was, the truth is that this building has managed to survive the pillory and reach our days with a current use dedicated to teaching and although in the 60s a small modifications were made to make it a single house, Today it shows a winding and continuous itinerary that I have had the opportunity to travel and I understand that it is much better inserted in this building whose author would have been Gaudí's successor in the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.