His construction genius marked the so-called golden age of the United States, and The New York Times announced his death defining him as “the architect of New York”. But his first signed work was in Sabadell.
The Valencian Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908), very unknown to the general public, is the Spaniard who has had the most effective architectural projection in the world. Essentially in a United States that was rising as the first world power: in New York, Grand Central Station, the old (and now gone) Pennsylvania Station, General Grant’s tomb, the City Hall subway line and station, the Queensboro Bridge or Carnegie Hall; the Boston Public Library or the Army War School in Washington. All these spaces would not exist without Guastavino.
He left Valencia for Barcelona at the age of 17, in 1859, when the Eixample de Cerdà plan was approved. He studied at the Escola de Mestres d’Obres (there was no Architecture degree in Barcelona yet) and began collaborating with the office of the master builder Jeroni Granell.
His life is like a novel, and it was a novel that allowed the architect Josep Llobet Bach to tie heads together and identify the first building signed by this legendary builder: it is the office house of Domènec Buxeda. Rambla de Sabadell, 1868.
“I discovered this building in 1981, just after finishing my degree, when we reviewed the city from top to bottom to draw up the architectural heritage plan, but then I didn’t know the figure of Guastavino”, explains Llobet.
The authorship remained there for four decades, sleeping on the technical sheet of the city’s protected urban heritage. No one went further or contextualized it in the master’s work.
Llobet discovered the genius of Guastavino in 2003 in New York, and went deeper into his legacy. “It was when I read his life as a novel by Javier Moro, when I saw the relationship that the master had with the Buxeda”, he explains. Guastavino’s uncle – a tailor and owner of the El Águila department store in Barcelona – had ties to Valais textiles. Llobet has reviewed the file in the Sabadell Historical Archive and has discovered that it is his first signed work.
The Domènec Buxeda house had a first project, in December 1867, signed by Granell and Guastavino. The final project, presented in August 1868 and with one more floor, is already signed only by Guastavino.
The house was renovated in 1923 by the architect Francesc Nebot without changing its essence: he reproduced the central arch on the two side doors and added a balustrade, but the rest of the facade and structure, with its large scale, remains the same.
Before and after this work, Guastavino collaborated on others without signing, such as the Industrial School. The first that he signed after Sabadell would not be until 1870 and 1871: the reform of the Galve house, in Sarrià, and the Julià-Vilar house, in Passeig de Gràcia.
Guastavino left for New York in 1881, two weeks before his sublime dome of the La Massa Theater in Vilassar was inaugurated: it was a premonition of what he would raise in the New World. He disembarked when the Statue of Liberty did not yet exist. He never came back.
There is a series on HBO that portrays the effervescence he found: The gilded age (La edad dorada). The firm of architects who build the Russell palace in fiction – McKim, Mead
The vault is a technique used in the Mediterranean since Roman times, but Guastavino himself emphasized its Catalan character in a lecture he offered as a guest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1889, after the success of the Boston Library.
“The teachers of the School of Barcelona, ??one of the most illustrious in Europe, in a city where brick is used more than anywhere else in the world, did not begin to focus on this style until in 1866 and 1868 – explained Guastavino at MIT. When they finally did notice it, it was only to comment in passing on its durability and possible usefulness, but they did not make it a subject of study, despite the fact that they spent their days walking on roofs built with this system , proof of how little importance it had for them as a science”
The Catalan vault was this, pure mason’s intuition and practice inherited from the centuries. “Despite this – recognized Guastavino in his MIT conference – everything I know about this subject is due to the wisdom of my teachers at the Escola de Barcelona, ??Joan Torras and Elies Rogent” [Torras, l’Eiffel Catalan, was decisive in incorporating iron into the vault].
Four years after arriving in New York, Guastavino began to patent variants of the Catalan vault that he had learned in Barcelona (and Sabadell). It was the effective, fast and economical solution for that infinite Eixample that was the United States, hungry for efficiency, speed and economy. A vault capable of opening large interior spaces in a nation of large exterior spaces.
“It had another great virtue – explains Llobet -: it was fireproof, an obsession of the Americans after the fires that devoured Chicago and Boston ten years before their arrival. He presented the system to the municipal technicians of New York by setting fire to a vault to show them that it did not burn.”
After his death, his son continued with the construction business and the Guastavino arches continued to mark the American skyline. In New York, the Municipal Building in Manhattan, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine or the elephant’s house in the Bronx Zoo. In Washington, the Supreme Court or the American Museum of Natural History. In Pittsburgh, Union Station. In Lincoln, the capitol of the state of Nebraska… as well as up to a thousand churches, train stations, museums or universities (Harvard, Berkeley, Yale or Columbia).
But none as sultry as New York’s Grand Central Oyster Bar. “If you stand on one side of the vault, whispering you can converse with another person on the opposite side, ten meters away, without those in the center finding out. They say that many New Yorkers have declared their love for these curves”, explains Llobet.
Guastavino’s memory gradually faded until the demolition, in 1963, of the spectacular Pennsylvania Station woke up all New York heritage alarms. Grand Central Station could not, should not, fall. “Isn’t it cruel to let our city die little by little, stripped of all its proud monuments until there is nothing left of its history and beauty to inspire our children?” lamented Jacqueline Kennedy.
This was how a master builder without an architect’s degree ended up marking the architecture of the 20th century empire. And it is still a splendid metaphor that the great immigrant distribution room of the mythical Ellis Island is supported by the arches of Guastavino, the Valencian emigrant who would build New York with a formula from old Rome.
Starting with Sabadell.
