Hospital de Sant Pau: A Hospital Built as Art

Most hospitals are built to be forgotten the moment you leave them. The Hospital de Sant Pau was built to be looked at. Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed it not as a machine for treating illness but as a work of art that happened to treat illness, on the conviction that beauty itself could help you heal. On the Sagrada Família tour it arrives as the counterweight to Gaudí's basilica: one building reaching for heaven, the other kneeling down to the human body, and the two of them staring at each other across the same avenue.

A hospital designed as art

Its full name is the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, and its architect, Domènech i Montaner, was one of the leading figures of Catalan modernisme. He built it between 1902 and 1930, and it has been described as the largest complex ever built in the Art Nouveau style. In 1997 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, jointly with the same architect's Palau de la Música Catalana, a pairing that recognised him as a master of the modernista idiom in his own right.

The building earns the word "art" the moment you look closely. It is richly decorated with mosaic, stained glass, sculpture and ceramic, the whole vocabulary of Catalan modernisme applied not to a mansion or a concert hall but to a place where people came to be sick and, with luck, to get better. That was the point Domènech was making. If a patient's surroundings could lift the spirit, then decoration was not indulgence. It was treatment.

Pavilions in a garden

The plan is as radical as the ornament. Rather than one large block, Domènech designed the hospital as a set of separate pavilions set in gardens. This grew out of a belief widely held in his era: that light, air and greenery aided recovery, and that packing the sick together under a single roof did the opposite. So he scattered the wards across green ground and let the gardens breathe between them.

There was a practical genius to it as well. The pavilions are connected below ground by tunnels and galleries, so patients and staff could move from one to another sheltered from the weather without ever surrendering the open-air layout above. Domènech's original plan called for 48 buildings. In the end 27 were actually constructed, and the ornate modernista pavilions among them are the surviving showpieces, the ones that carry the mosaic and the stained glass.

The hospital was no museum piece in its early life. It functioned as a working hospital until June 2009, when medical services finally moved to a new building on the same grounds. Only then did the old pavilions come free. After restoration, they reopened in 2014 as a museum and cultural centre, the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau, so that the art could at last be the whole purpose rather than the setting.

The diagonal that points at Gaudí

The most extraordinary thing about the Hospital de Sant Pau is not on the building at all. It is in the way the city was arranged around it. Its monumental main entrance stands at the northeast head of the Avinguda de Gaudí, and that avenue is a diagonal. It cuts deliberately across the strict orthogonal grid of Ildefons Cerdà's Eixample, the rectangular street plan that governs almost everything else in this part of Barcelona.

The diagonal exists for a reason. It was aligned so that the hospital and the Sagrada Família frame each other along the avenue's axis. Stand at the hospital's gate and look down the Avinguda de Gaudí, and Gaudí's basilica closes the view at the far end. Turn and look back from the basilica, and the hospital answers. Two of the greatest works of Catalan modernisme were set to face one another across a single sightline, a private conversation between architects held in the geometry of the streets.

That conversation is the reason this piece and its companion belong together. The other side of the story lives in the stone book Gaudí left unfinished, the basilica at the far end of this very diagonal, and both buildings speak the same invented language of Modernisme. You can walk the axis between them from the Barcelona city page, the best walking tours of Barcelona, or the architecture walking tours of Barcelona.

Come to Sant Pau expecting a hospital and you will be disarmed. Come expecting art and you will understand what Domènech was arguing: that the place where a body mends should be as carefully made as any cathedral, and that a healing room deserved mosaic as much as a chapel did. It is worth remembering how long that argument was allowed to stand. The complex was built across nearly three decades, from 1902 to 1930, and it went on serving the sick for another eighty years after that. Very few buildings get to be both a masterpiece and a working ward for a century. Sant Pau did, and the mosaics you see today watched real recoveries happen underneath them.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Hospital de Sant Pau" (en.wikipedia.org)
• Roamer audio-tour transcript, "Sagrada Família" (barcelona-sagrada-familia)