Editing Barcelona (section)

=== Lluís Domènech i Montaner ===
The son of a bookbinder, Lluís Domènech i Montaner was born in Barcelona on 27 December 1849. He was a versatile man who combined his passion for drawing with literature, history, deluxe editions, teaching, politics -and of course architecture. Domènech understood the work of an architect as similar to that of an orchestra conductor. He held the baton and all the instruments (the glaziers, the sculptors, the carpenters, the manufacturers of mosaics and paving...) had to sound perfect.

The young Domènech was a brilliant student of physical and natural sciences in Barcelona, and later of engineering in Madrid. This discipline led him finally to study architecture, in which he qualified in 1873. He was a lecturer at the School of Architecture of Barcelona from its foundation in 1875 (so he taught Gaudí and Puig i Cadafalch), and he was director of the School from 1900 to 1920. The publication in 1879 in the journal La Renaixença of the article “En busca de una arquitectura nacional” (“The quest for a national architecture”) gave him, along with other later works, a certain fame as an art theoretician and disseminator of the latest ideas in architecture, especially those of his much admired Viollet-le-Duc.

Considered today by many to be the “most Modernista” of the artists of Catalan Modernisme, Lluís Domènech did indeed travel and he knew what was being done in the rest of Europe by the artists of the Art Nouveau, Secession and the Arts and Crafts movements, with some of whom he established a friendship. He was, in fact, a humanist of his time, who developed himself in a wide range of fields, including botany, publishing and illustration. He was one of the most outstanding heraldists in the country, a journalist of certain renown and on several occasions he was elected president of the Ateneu Barcelonès, the main cultural association of the time. He had a long political career, starting in a Catalan nationalist movement called Jove Catalunya (Young Catalonia) and reaching the presidency of the Lliga de Catalunya and the Unió Catalanista, the first major parties of the Catalan Renaixença (the “Rebirth” of Catalan culture and nationalism, which came to life in the second half of the 19th Century). He was foremost in the drafting of the first declaration of sovereignty for Catalonia, Les Bases de Manresa in 1892, and he was elected member of the Madrid Congress in in 1904 in the so-called “four presidents’ ticket”, considered to be the first political triumph of Catalan nationalism. Soon, however, Domènech came into conflict with the almighty leader of the Lliga Regionalista, Francesc Cambó, and he abandoned conservative Catalan nationalism to found a new left-wing party, Esquerra Catalana, and to become the editor of its newspaper El Poble Català.

General Primo de Rivera in 1923 led to the dismantling of the regional structures of government in Catalonia, the prohibition of Catalan nationalist political activity at all levels, and the suppression of all but the most naive expressions of Catalan culture (even the Barcelona Football Club stadium was closed!). Domènech, always a passionate lover of life and refinement and of the most civilised forms of expression, felt profoundly affected by the brutal repression of a military regime that he could only see as illegitimate and barbaric. He retired to family life and died that winter, on the same day on which he had been born.

In addition to Barcelona, Domènech performed several important works in Canet de Mar, the home town of the family of his mother, Maria Montaner, and in Reus, thanks to his great friendship with the intellectual Pau Font de Rubinat.