CaixaForum: The Casaramona Textile Mill
Why is it significant?
Walk up to the long brick building with the crenellated walls and the two slender towers, and before you go anywhere near the entrance, notice that it does not look like a factory at all. It looks like a castle from a fairy tale, built by someone who loved brick a little too much.
Key Facts
| Place | CaixaForum: The Casaramona Textile Mill |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 6-8, 08038 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37150, 2.14970 |
| Part of Walk | Montjuïc, the Hill of Big Dreams: Barcelona's 1929 Expo, Olympic Ring & Castle |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up to the long brick building with the crenellated walls and the two slender towers, and before you go anywhere near the entrance, notice that it does not look like a factory at all. It looks like a castle from a fairy tale, built by someone who loved brick a little too much.
It was a factory, though. Casimir Casaramona, a cotton manufacturer, commissioned it from Josep Puig i Cadafalch, and it was finished in 1911. The city even gave it its annual prize for the best new building. Here is the detail most visitors miss: those elegant towers were not decoration. They held water tanks. Textile mills burned easily, and the story goes that Casaramona had already lost an earlier works to fire, so Puig split the plant into separate single-storey halls divided by streets, with water ready to fall from above.
And yet the mill worked for only a handful of years. Around 1920 production stopped, and this beautiful machine for weaving cotton became a warehouse. After the 1929 Exposition it took an even stranger turn: for decades it housed the horses and stables of the national police. Imagine mounted officers trotting out under these modernista arches.
The savings bank la Caixa bought the building and, after a long restoration, opened it in 2002 as CaixaForum, an arts centre. The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed the new entrance, which is why you go in beneath two great trees made of steel and glass, rising out of a sunken courtyard. Old brick above, new metal below, and somehow they get on.
Puig i Cadafalch is a name you will keep meeting on this hill. He drew the first plan for the whole Exposition, before politics pushed him aside. Now cross the avenue towards the wide stone basin at the foot of the great staircase. If it is evening, you may already hear music.