Josep Maria Jujol

Josep Maria Jujol (1879-1949) created some of Spain's greatest modern buildings in a style known as modernisme (the Barcelona equivalent of art nouveau). In one decade, between 1913 and 1923, the young architect built five works that entitle him to be classified as a pioneer of Modernism; yet Jujol, a collaborator with Antoni Gaudi on some of that master's most admired works, has been largely unrecognized and his independent architecture unknown. Josep Maria Jujol: Five Major Buildings places the architect's work in the highly charged religious and political context of Barcelona - from the late 19th century through the Spanish Civil War and on to the time of Jujol's death in 1949. This book considers Jujol's career as parallel to, but not part of, the nascent avant-garde emerging from Barcelona's cafe Els Quatre Gats and the Galleries Dalmau, with which Picasso, Duchamp, Dali, Sert, and Miro were at one time associated. Josep Maria Jujol: Five Major Buildings traces the architect's development inthis and Gaudi's conservative religious environment, as well as in a broader European frame. It also considers Jujol's use of symbolic, abstract calligraphy, collage, and painting as advanced semiotic elements in an extraordinary amalgamation of craft, material, technique and space fused into visionary architecture.