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In La Vanguardia Readers’ Photos we can see this series of photographs of the staircase of the Park Hotel in Barcelona. The series was made during one of the visits I make periodically to this city to enjoy its people, its gastronomy and its architecture.
Did you know that stairs have their own branch of science? Scalarology, whose research topic is “overcoming unevenness by constructions with steps”? Its creator, Friedrich Mielke, maintained that the staircase is “the queen of architecture” although “it has never been given the attention it deserves.”
The Park Hotel is a nine-story building located in Born in front of the Estació de França. It was one of the first buildings of the neo-rationalist movement in Europe and is listed as a Cultural Asset of Local Interest (BCIL).
It was designed by Antoni de Moragas i Gallissà, a Barcelona architect who was awarded the Cross of Sant Jordi in 1985, and inaugurated in 1953. It was later renovated in 1991 by his son, also the architect Antoni de Moragas i Spa.
Remembering the classic dilemma generated by Gropius, since the birth of the Bauhaus, between form and function in architecture, there is no doubt that in addition to their mandatory use requirements in multi-story buildings, stairs have had aesthetic possibilities for centuries. and artistic in addition to the purely functional.
This happens with the stairs of the Park Hotel, of undeniable beauty, and increasingly appreciated by lovers of architectural photography.
The hotel was already photographed in 1954 by the great Francesc Català-Roca and more recently its staircase has become an object of desire for Instagrammers from all over the world, with famous versions made by, among others, @nicanorgarcia, @stoptheroc or @mabelcf_ .
Since Barcelona has a good catalog of fantastic staircases of a wide variety of styles, those in this building always occupy a prominent place on lists of the most photogenic in the city.
The Park Hotel staircase is spiral type with an irregularly shaped central hole or eye. It connects all the floors of the building and starts in front of the reception. It concentrates all vertical traffic through a continuous wooden railing that goes up to the top floor.
Both the overhead shot, through the gap from the last plateau, and the low angle view from the base, have an undoubted appeal.
The repetition of harmonious geometric shapes in soft white, greenish and gray tones, in contrast with the darker wood of the handrail, make up one of the most interesting stairs in Barcelona.
