Recently, the Sant Pau’s Hospital has been refurbished to protect and show all its architectural riches and turns it into the biggest modernist building group in Europe.
Situated few blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the Sant Pau’s Hospital was declared a World Heritage place by the UNESCO in 1997, and now can be visited, after its deep refurbishment. The hospital, planed by Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, was created as a city inside a city, a sum of spacious colourful pavilions, well ventilated and situated in a good position and surrounded by gardens that could improve the health of the patients. Domènech i Montaner was a modernist architect, the contemporary of Antoni Gaudí, who is the author of the Palau de la Música in Barcelona.
Doubtless I have photographed Sant Pau’s Hospital because of the huge fascination that the expressiveness of the Catalan modernist architecture causes on me as architecture photograph – an architecture photograph concentrated almost exclusively in reproducing contemporary architecture – despite the almost daily relation that I have when I look at it during my walks around the city. Indeed is that the biggest difficulty to tackle a photograph project like this one, to go beyond the merely daily routine and find in the Sant Pau’s modernist architecture the most attractive abstract power of the thousands of decorative pieces, sculptures and intricate ornamental details. Then again, to capture the simplest appearance and create an essential continuity in the purest forms, in order to add the colour plastic quality to the buildings illuminated by the different lights of the day.
The simplest, clearest and brightest the visual language of the photograph framing is, the most harmoniously they are formed and they will more quickly attract the spectator’s attention. Simple forms and saturated colours work always when an architectural project in photographs is interpreted, and much more in a building as Sant Pau’s Hospital.
I am convinced that capturing in a conscious and pre-meditated way these plastic and more abstract qualities of a building of a unique heritage, as it is, is the only method to portray truly in pictures their historical continuation and to put it out of a time.
