Lluís Domènech i Montaner
Lluís Domènech i Montaner was an architect, teacher and politician in Barcelona. His concert hall, the Palau de la Música Catalana, and the Sant Pau hospital are Catalan Modernisme in its richest form, filled with ceramics, glass and sculpture.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner was born in 1850 in Barcelona, the son of a bookbinder and publisher. He studied architecture in Barcelona and Madrid and in 1875 became a teacher at the new school of architecture in Barcelona, which he later directed for many years. He was one of the leaders of the Catalan cultural revival, the Renaixença, and was active in politics for Catalan self-government. In 1878 he wrote an essay on the search for a national architecture, in which he advocated a modern style built on Catalan traditions.
For the World’s Fair in Barcelona in 1888 he designed a café and restaurant, today a former zoological museum, in which he experimented with exposed brick and iron. He set up workshops where craftsmen tried out ceramics, wrought iron and glass. His foremost works are the Palau de la Música Catalana, 1905–1908, and the Sant Pau hospital, a town of pavilions linked by underground passages, built in 1902–1930. He also designed the Casa Lleó Morera on the Passeig de Gràcia and the Institut Pere Mata in Reus.
Domènech died in Barcelona in 1923. He was one of the three great architects of Catalan Modernisme, together with Antoni Gaudí and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. The Palau de la Música and Sant Pau became World Heritage Sites in 1997. His work shows how architecture could become the expression of a national culture, something National Romanticism in the Nordic countries was also seeking at the same time.