About Jose Llinàs.

Looking at some of the works by Josep Llinàs since 2000 —the ‘Vila de Gràcia’ library, the ‘Can Ginestar’
library, the Gràcia District cen- tral library and municipal archives—, and a series of recent projects —Winery in
Mendívil, Institute of Ocular Microsurgery, Single-family dwelling in Llinars del Vallès, Theatre, multipurpose
hall and music school in Vic and Extensions to Viladecans Town Hall— the observer will proba- bly think that
this architect has allowed himself to be carried away by his Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times which in the last few
years has accustomed us to a maximum of geometric freedom, a freedom that sometimes aspires to
formlessness. Those who are familiar with his trajectory might adduce another reason for some of his new
formal freedoms— his immersion in the personality of Josep Ma Jujol, a warm, dream-like architect whose
Metropol Theatre was restored and reformed by Llinàs between 1992 and 1995, and became his focus in sev-
eral highly suggestive texts which show that his interest in Jujol dates back many years.1 While I do not deny
either of these two reasons, this essay tries to present some of the key points that help to understand his work,
focusing more on the continuity of his trajectory than the discontinuity which can be detected at the end of the
last century.

Alejandro de la Sota made a perspicacious observation in his Introduction to the 1996 book on the work of Josep
Llinàs. As many of us know, between 1985 and 1987, Llinàs restored the Civil Government building in
Tarragona, one of de la Sota’s masterworks, alongside the original author. This experience forged a mutual
professional appreciation and friendship that was maintained over the years. Llinàs has writ- ten several
clarifying texts about the work of this architect,2 who in turn wrote the following about him in the above-
mentioned Introduction:

“Llinàs, tired of the mundanity of these issues and their security, subjected his confident self to the dangerous experiment of
making present, fragmenting and playing with the given factors on impossible sites, jarring properties, changing budgets and
forgettable rules; a permanent renunciation of the finished, rounded architectural object ...” 3

This “permanent renunciation of the finished, rounded architectural object “ in the work of Llinàs is a feature
that is present throughout his professional career, with a number of specific manifestations in his work. Above
all it is a renunciation of building’s consideration as a for- mally independent object, a negation of the
architectural form as an abstract self-absorption, but also its negation as a non-critical repro- duction of reality.
Writing about this, Llinàs says,

“When the architect focuses his work on form in the belief that he can manipulate it freely, he ends up immersed in it, like a bog
he cannot escape from ‘no matter how much he pulls on his own horse’, and his architecture ends up.... imitating reality and, as a
result, unfortunately contributing to its opaqueness”.4

In a text on José Antonio Coderch, remembered with admiration and respect after working with him for two
years as a student, he writes,

“What qualifies a building as the construction of a previously non-existent reality is not the application of technical resources but
the attitude of the person responsible for it, in the use of his or her attributions, towards reality: and the greater the con- formity
to it, the more this person disappears in the shadow of the architect, while the building —essentially determined by the tools of
the trade— becomes a poor simulation, a reproduction of the extant, or an absurd exercise in virtuosity. The houses look like
themselves.

(In Coderch’s buildings, on the other hand,) there is no representation of reality; there is no architect. His houses, which do not
seem to be houses, propose a different transparent, precise reality, tainted by that tenacious need to look without inter-
mediations”.5

We could consider a series of ‘renunciations’ —in relation to what Sota and Llinàs himself have both written—a
decisive part of his archi- tectural baggage, and use them as a way to approach his work:6
1 DISFIGURING THE PRISM [RENOUNCING VOLUMETRIC ROTUNDITY]

Although Josep Llinàs often begins with prismatic forms —espe- cially in the pre-2000 period—, these forms
are subjected to a series of operations that undermine their inherent rotundity and the tendency to be
monumental of self-contained, perfect and complete volumes. The frequent formal operations that follow in his
work are initially aimed at countering this tendency and reducing the building’s effect of size, although they are
also aimed at high- lighting one part. They try to give the building an appropriate scale to its nature and its
situation and, in any case, prevent it from imposing on the context through an excessive apparent size or the
rotundity of its volume.

DECOMPOSING, CHOPPING UP

The Single family dwelling in Begur (1978/1980), probably his most ‘Platonic’ project, breaks down into a
number of apparently independent elements: a series of retainer walls, a dark box, a transparent box, a horizontal
lattice roof and a small (unbuilt) mar- quee roof. This achieves the aim of, “regarding the house as an aux- iliary
pavilion of another hypothetical and non-existent with the con- ventional attributes of a mansion”.7 The
breakdown of the house into such diverse elements and the unified, abstract treatment of each one makes it seem
to be a large pavilion instead of the minia- ture of a large mansion.

The Single family dwelling in Sant Feliú de Llobregat (1986/1988) was designed when Llinàs was working on
the restoration of the Tarragona Civil Government, which is probably why it is his closest work to Alejandro de
la Sota’s architecture. It essentially consists of two clearly differentiated parts: a ‘modern’ prismatic volume
capped with sheet metal and another volume stacked on top, which is fin- ished with a ‘traditional’ sloping tile
roof. This smaller volume has the same depth as its lower counterpart but is set back on both sides, while the
roof is also set back slightly from the sheet metal wall, making it clearly subordinated to the other. The
traditional house image given by the roof is blurred by these setbacks and contrasts with the abstraction of the
sheet metal volume.

A negation phenomenon of the building’s volumetric nature can also be found in the ‘Vila de Gràcia’ library
(2000/2002). The build- ing takes up the entire corner allotment, with a bulge in the outer wall that makes it
seem to be “a suitcase that has been filled with more clothes than reasonably fit “.8 This accentuates its condition
as a uni- tary container, which on the other hand is negated by the disconti- nuity used in the façade treatment. A
horizontal metal shape that is repeated at equal heights but only coincides with the floor slabs on some levels,
marks a dark, sunken line that chops up the volume into a series of ‘slices’. As the model shows quite clearly,
this large- scale groove makes the building seem to be the result of stacking cut and sculpted material rather than
the initial impression of warp- ing a slightly flexible envelope.9 This strata division mitigates the larger volume
conferred on the building by the bulge.

In the ‘Can Ginestar’ library (2001/2003), one of the declared pur- poses was to preserve the old manor house,
its garden and the characteristic property fence. From the street, a blind wall is the only visible part of the new
building —a continuity of the fence— and a lookout/‘sentry box’ on the corner formed by the street and a
pedestrian lane. From the garden, the building seems to be a sim- ple glazed gallery floating on a pane of glass
that separates it from the ground. To avoid disturbing the original image and scale of the manor house, the new
construction is broken down into these three elements: fence, lookout-‘sentry box’ and gallery.

STEPPING, SUBTRACTING

The Primary health care centre in Ripollet (1982/1985), has a stepped section that gives “the construction a
minimal appearance in relation to the entrance, and is only fully visible with all its volume on the river
frontage”.10 For this purpose, the platform covering a parking area in front of the building on the same level as
the entrance contributes to this apparent effect of size reduction. Seen from this platform, the building is reduced
to a series of increasingly set back horizontal strips.

The Apartment block in Vallcarca (1991/1996), originally four single-family dwellings, is on a very deep
allotment with a steep 12 m high slope between the parallel streets it faces. The volume has five staggered steps
which minimise the scale of the block on this deep site.
Two buildings for the Barcelona Polytechnic use various stepping and subtraction processes with the prism. In
the Civil Engineering School classroom and departmental building (1987/1989), “the longer north and south
facades are set back from the first floor upwards in order to enlarge the section of the pedestrian streets...