The extinct Casa Llorach illuminated the neighborhood – then pueblo – of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles during the first three decades of the 20th century. And yes, illuminate is the correct verb: on the one hand, because it is a work by Puig i Cadafalch erected in parallel to the celebrated Casa de les Punxes, and, on the other hand, because its then owner, Isabel Llorach, daughter of Concepcion Dolsa , turned the venue into a must-see for the intellectual and cultural world of the moment. Not only in the sphere of the Catalan bourgeoisie, but worldwide.
Today the Llorach House is just a memory reflected in memories and photographs tinted in the yellow of time. In the block that the palace occupied (the square formed by Avenir and Travessera de Gràcia and Muntaner and Santaló streets in Barcelona) there is no memory of the work that Puig i Cadafalch built in 1904… at first glance. In the discretion of the portal at number 263 Muntaner Street (the same number that marked the entrance to the Casa Llorach), in front of the elevators, four modernist columns with floral motifs that supported one of the palace’s ballrooms survive as witnesses of the passing of the years and the Barcelona that was.
The importance of Casa Llorach in Barcelona between the wars lies in the cultural will of its occupant, Isabel Llorach. Heir to both the palace and a large part of the family heritage, Llorach (1874-1954) became a patron and advocate of the arts at a time when cultural concern exceeded the merely aesthetic.
Although the gardens of the house served as entertainment for the bourgeoisie of the time, Llorach soon gave up his heritage and his own home as a setting for beauty and culture. Thus, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the god of Russian ballet, danced in the halls of the Casa Llorach during his visit to Barcelona in 1917 to perform at the Liceu. A visit that, his widow Rómola recalled in Nijinsky’s Life, ended with the dancer arrested and released thanks to the efforts of Francesc Cambó.
Casa Llorach, and the generosity of its owner, also received a visit from Carlos Gardel, who sang for a cast of those chosen at the venue. It was in 1928, in the days before a trip to Santander invited by José Samitier, a footballer from FC Barcelona – of which Gardel was a fan –, on the occasion of the Copa del Rey final. Beyond the Casa Llorach, a brief but intense friendship emerged from that trip between the poet Rafael Alberti and the Argentine singer. As a result of those days and those games, Alberti composed his Ode to Platko, and Gardel re-recorded his tango Patadura to include various FC Barcelona players in his verses. Temps was temps.
A report in Bellaterra magazine from April 1924 allows us to know what life was like in Casa Llorach, in addition to providing the few images that remain of the interior of the premises. In Catalan, the text highlights that “in terms of the social aspect, the house is, without a doubt, even better known. Frequently, the society chronicles of the press review events held in its sumptuous halls. (…) Teas, dances, parties for eminent artists who pass through Barcelona… Of these, the one offered to the very kind and eminent Italian actress Vera Vergani [visiting with her theater initiative in Barcelona] and other main elements are still recent. of the company”.
From the meetings and activities carried out at the Casa Llorach, in 1929, the Conferentia Club emerged, an initiative by Francesc Cambó chaired by Isabel Llorach whose objective was “the promotion of cultural conferences”, according to La Vanguardia in its edition of the 21st. April of the aforementioned year, a club of which the architect and landscape designer Nicolau Rubió i Tudurí was a founding member. The initiative only ended with the Civil War, although it had time to bring figures from all branches of culture to Barcelona, ??from Federico García Lorca or Ramón Gómez de la Serna to Paul Valéry or Ortega y Gasset.
All that activity by Isabel Llorach, in any case, had a price. A purely monetary price: after the crash of ’29, Llorach was forced to choose between the family home of Puig i Cadafalch or maintaining her patronage activity. Reality resolves the doubt: three decades after rising in the then town of Sant Gervasi, the house ceased to be part of the landscape of the neighborhood of the same name.
The demolition of the Llorach House in 1934 was due to the financial need of the patron. The lot on which the building was located increased in value as Barcelona expanded towards the north, so Llorach decided to do without the house, but without ceasing to live on the premises. In contrast to the modernist sumptuousness, Llorach had a six-story building built, in a rationalist style, in which she would occupy the attic. Even today, the building is a rarity next to its neighbors, later neoclassical buildings, such as the pair of homes by the architect Joan Gumà i Cuevas that occupy numbers 265 and 267 on the same Muntaner street.
However, the authorship of the building at number 263 also has its mystery. In different documents from the city’s archives, it is attributed to Adolf Florensa whose legacy in Barcelona populates Via Laietana, with buildings such as the Foment del Treball headquarters or Casa Cambó. Also in documentation of the municipal archive – and in the current facade of 263 – the same building is attributed to Rubió i Tudurí, in association with Puig i Cadafalch himself.
Although the Fundació Rubió, which manages the architect’s legacy, has no documentary evidence of the authorship of the building, it is plausible that the design belonged to him, given the aforementioned exterior signature of the building. Furthermore, Rubió, better known as an author of gardens and open spaces, had recently worked in the area with the creation of the nearby Turó Park. As for Puig i Cadafalch, it is clear that the authorship is limited to the columns of the original house.
Why there are precisely four columns by Puig i Cadafalch that remain in the building remains an enigma, which can be solved with knowledge of the facts. Although the hybridization of styles – a modernist interior in a rationalist building – is not something typical of the time, given that the commission for the work belonged to Isabel Llorach herself, the patron could have set as a condition the conservation of that element that He remembered, in the building in which he was going to live, his old house.
The address, in any case, would be the same. Although it occupied the vast majority of the block, the door of Casa Llorach corresponded to 263 Muntaner Street. The same portal in which the columns of Puig i Cadafalch survive today.
Furthermore, in that 1934 in which the Llorach House became part of the past, those four columns have some redress. Not long before, in 1928, the four columns that Puig i Cadafalch built in what are now the fountains of Montjuïc, and which constituted a symbol of Catalanism, were demolished by order of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That four other columns, also by Puig i Cadafalch, that supported rooms where Catalan and international culture coexisted, survived at the end of the Casa Llorach goes beyond the symbolic. Ultimately, Llorach protected Catalanism by offering her house as the headquarters of the Wagnerian Association of Barcelona, ??of which she was a founder. An entity that was chaired by Joaquim Pena, also founder of the Joventut magazine, in which she disseminated her Catalan Pompeu Gener theses.
Be that as it may, the marble memory of a restless Barcelona open to culture subsists in a discreet portal on Muntaner Street, to the curiosity of neighbors and passers-by, and as a modernist witness of how the city pulsated a little over a century ago.
