Rehabilitation Domènech house
credits
Site: Canet de Mar (Barcelona)
Client: La Caixa de Pensions
Year of project: 1980
Construction: 1982
Area: 300m2
location
description
In Canet, two watercourses, Buscarons and Gabarra, converge before reaching the sea. On this converging triangle Lluís Domènech i Montaner purchased a property where the old 18th century farmhouse, can Rocosa, had a closed front garden that extended to the vertex of this triangle. Here, Domenech decided to build the new family house, reserving the farmhouse for himself as his study. In 1979, a banking entity purchased the property, it assigned Can Rocosa to the Town Council as the Domènech i Montaner House Musem, and entrusted us to project the seat for the entity occupying Domènech house and the part of the garden needed. The project consisted of building a fence building (housing the bank’s operation room), playing the same sintactic role as the original fence in relation to the existing elements. This was the idea that we had to maintain and which underpinned the project. We had to resolve accesses and views from the street to Can Rocosa, preserve the palm trees, create a pergola to achieve a sense of distance from the height of the operations room to street level and establish an umbilical cord linking to Domènech house. Choosing base concrete was part of the aim of creating this “distance”, with a cold, classic, almost archaic, architecture, both in relation to the Domenechian Art Noveau and to farmhouse’s baroque traditionalism.
