The new Catany Center in Llucmajor, designed by Josep Lluis Mateo, also symbolizes that duality between the small and the large, between the intimate and the public, between memory and its ability to project itself into the future.
The project is characterized by a search for dialogue with the heritage references of two buildings, now united as a whole. Blurred shadows of the past that are projected in our contemporaneity through the construction of this contemporary reference museum center, where the exceptional works of Catany have a space that talks with our current reality.
The four-storey building is completed with an intelligent set of small gestures and actions that articulate the different spaces and, in turn, in them you can read the architectural career of Josep Lluis Mateo, a mixture of fresh gestures combined with his solvent experience.
Toni Catany International Photography Centre by Mateo Arquitectura. Photograph by Gabriel Ramon. Aldo Amoretti
Toni Catany International Photography Centre by Mateo Arquitectura. Photograph by Gabriel Ramon. Aldo Amoretti
Description of project by Josep Lluís Mateo
In the historic center of the city of Llucmajor (Mallorca), partially occupying the birthplace of photographer Toni Catany, the International Photography Centre is built, based on the work and collection of the great artist.
The place, the history, the remains, the scale, the classic typology of houses closed to the outside and open to patios… all this, obviously, is at the base of the project. They are ghosts or realities that accompany us, although we must control them.
However, we do not forget that our mission here was to build a contemporary reference museum center, where exceptional works should have their proper presence.
We conserve remains, some rebuilt, we restored the facades in a carefully primitive way... But the space is new, open, flexible, large, available, with very controlled light, sometimes gloomy...
Some singular elements appear: a staircase that flies, another that recreates the chromatic world of the reference artist ...
Although the protagonist is always the space and a close detail that he accompanies, which is both radical and friendly.
Epilogue:
This is a building constructed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the different moments of isolation, distance and digitality. Although here we had to produce something very concrete, close, manual in a distant and sometimes desperately archaic world.
It has not been easy.
Josep Lluís Mateo.
