When commissioned to design a new home for La Massana Fine Arts School in Barcelona, located behind the city’s famous Boqueria Market, architect Carme Pinós faced a double challenge—wrestling with both the density of the city’s Medieval Raval quarter and with the masses of tourists who flood the plaza that the building faces. Affiliated with the University of Barcelona, Massana is a hybrid, offering university degrees in the visual arts and design, vocational degrees in the applied arts, and an extensive high school program for local students.
Pinós’s response was to turn the school inward around a skylit interior “street” or atrium. This solution was inspired, she says, by the building that was the school’s quarters since its founding in 1929, at the nearby Medieval Santa Creu Hospital, where it was walled off from the street and organized around a leafy courtyard, one of those surprising spaces hidden inside many blocks of the city’s Gothic Quarter. But unlike the outdated facilities in the former hospital, Pinós’s design also engages the mobbed spaces outside in a guarded way, with gestures such as a glazed exhibit area for student work on the ground floor, and large balcony windows scattered across the otherwise opaque facade. With its red ceramic cladding and dynamic massing, the building is a striking presence on the plaza.
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