L’hotel Internacional de Lluís Domènech i Montaner: arquitectura moderna i nacional

Abstract

1888, during the Universal Exposition was built on land at the port of Barcelona and within months, a grand International Hotel for a thousand people, who after a few years was demolished leaving no trace. The most important constructive adventure of our country, said Oriol Bohigas. The building, referenced in the stories of the Exhibition and in the monographs of Lluis Domenech i Montaner, the architectural project author, is lacking, however, a study linking the various facets of the work. The paper places the adventure of Hotel into the vicissitudes of the exhibition initiative, providing new data about another projects those who had to face which was accompanied by the architectural design of Domenech i Montaner. But it also relates to the turning of the Catalan nationalist movement, until then directed by Valenti Almirall, and then became led by Domenech. Another axis of work linking the International Hotel with the ideology of Lluis Domenech i Montaner expressed in In search of a national architecture”, one article which is discussed in the text itself and in relation to contemporay architectural theory, specifically that of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. And entering into the analysis of the architecture are discussed typological and compositional issues as well as stylistic and linguistic referents. An attempt, therefore, to weave a social history with another about the city and the architecture.