Week 6: Modern Life and Design

As the Barcelona fair of 1888 was primarily an industrial exposition, there was not much—apart from the various displays of regional products and goods—pertaining to the home or domestic life. That is not to say, however, that theExposició Universal had no impact in such spheres; in particular, the effects of the exposition can be seen in Barcelona's domestic architecture—that is to say, its apartment buildings—in the following years. This was accomplished not by design but rather by the fair's general, broad-reaching architectural impact.

As mentioned in my blog post on architecture at the fair, many buildings featured attempts at the creation of an indigenous Catalan architectural style for the modern era. The most successful, I argued, was the Arc de Triomf, which blended Roman form with neo-Mudéjar (a form of Moorish revival) decoration. One of the fair's most important buildings, still standing today, was Lluís Domènech i Montaner's Café-Restaurant, known today as the Castell dels Tres Dragons (Castle of the Three Dragons). This building, too, adopted the brickwork and ornament characteristic of the neo-Mudéjar style, but took a more medieval western European form—the castle—as its basis. A survey of the rest of the buildings reveals that the most common architectural themes are historicism and eclecticism, both tenets of the Modernist movement that rose to prominence in the exposition's wake.

Another structure at the 1888 fair that had a similar impact on Barcelona's Modernist apartment buildings was the Japanese Pavilion. The Japonisme craze had hit the major capitals of western Europe in the preceding decades, and to a lesser extent Barcelona, too. In 1881 the "Imperial Japanese Pavilion" was built on one of the expanding city's main new avenues to house a private collection of Japanese art. The 1888 exposition, however, represented Japan's first official introduction to Spain; Japan built a pavilion for the fair and a Japanese home. [1] Japanese exhibitors displayed art, furniture, and decorative arts, establishing trading contacts to prolong the cultural and artistic exchange between Japan and the homes of Barcelona. Though general European tastes at the time were certainly a factor, the exposition was a major motivation for the spread and promotion of Japonisme in Barcelona. [2]

Imperial Japanese Pavilion, 1881. From Bru i Turull, "Japanese Influence on Decorative Arts in Barcelona."

And indeed, Japan—and, by extension, other Orientalist and Orientalizing architectural styles—is fairly prominently included among the myriad periods, regions, and tastes represented in Barcelona's domestic buildings at the end of the nineteenth century and for decades to come.

Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Casa Rosa Alemany, Avinguda de la República Argentina, 6. 1931.

[1] Bru i Turull, Ricard. "Japanese Influence on Decorative Arts in Barcelona" in Design Discourse, vol. IV no. 1 (July 2008).

[2] Barlés Baguena, Elena, and Almazán Tomás, David. "The Far Eastern Art Collecting in Spain" in Artigrama, no. 18 (2003).