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There are architects whose work belongs to museums, guidebooks and histories of art. And there are architects whose work becomes inseparable from a place. Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert belongs to both categories.
His name inevitably appears beside that of Antoni Gaudí. His imagination can be found in some of the most celebrated creations of Catalan Modernisme. At Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, Jujol's extraordinary ability with colour, materials, surfaces and decorative invention contributed to works that millions of people now associate almost instinctively with Gaudí.
But perhaps there is another way to understand Jujol. Leave Barcelona. Follow the Llobregat. And stop at Sant Joan Despí. Here, Jujol was not simply the collaborator of a famous architect. Here, he became part of a town.
It is difficult to imagine Sant Joan Despí at the beginning of the twentieth century if we only know the town today. Modern Sant Joan Despí belongs completely to the Barcelona metropolitan landscape. Roads, railway lines, apartment blocks, industries and services connect it to the enormous urban organism surrounding the Catalan capital.
It is known throughout Catalunya as the home of TV3, the Catalan public television broadcaster. Football supporters associate it with FC Barcelona's Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper.
For decades, industry has also formed part of its identity. But the Sant Joan Despí that Jujol encountered was very different. It was still essentially agricultural. Fields surrounded a relatively small settlement. Wheat, maize, vegetables, hemp and vines had traditionally been cultivated there. At the beginning of the twentieth century, industry was still remarkably limited. This was the landscape into which Jujol introduced his imagination. And that matters. Because Jujol did not impose an urban architecture upon a rural world. He listened to the place.
Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí began in 1913 with the Torre de la Creu, commissioned by Josefa Romeu. Imagine its appearance then. Not surrounded by the dense metropolitan city we know today, but emerging within an agricultural landscape. Five intersecting cylinders. Curved roofs. Colour. Ceramic surfaces. An architecture apparently determined to ignore the straight line whenever imagination offered a more interesting alternative. The building must have seemed extraordinary. But Jujol did not treat rural Sant Joan Despí as an empty stage upon which an architect could display his genius.
The relationship gradually became deeper. He met local families. He received further commissions. He worked with local craftsmen. He transformed existing buildings. He designed new ones. Eventually, he worked for the Town Council itself. During the last decades of his life, Sant Joan Despí was no longer simply somewhere Jujol happened to have projects. It was one of his places.
Perhaps nothing explains Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí better than Can Negre. The building already existed. It was a seventeenth-century farmhouse. Another architect might have regarded the old structure as an obstacle to modernity. Jujol did something much more interesting. He transformed it. He preserved and reinvented. Traditional materials and techniques coexist with extraordinary forms, religious symbolism, colour, wrought iron, plaster, wood, ceramics and that astonishing carriage-shaped gallery dominating the façade. The old farmhouse does not disappear beneath Modernisme. It becomes something else while remaining recognisable. And perhaps this tells us something important about Jujol himself. His creativity did not necessarily require a blank page. He could begin with what was already there. A wall. A farmhouse. A discarded material. A landscape. An imperfection. For Jujol, limitations were frequently invitations to imagine.
By the 1920s, Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí had become institutional as well as artistic. He was producing reports for the Town Council and in 1926 became its auxiliary municipal architect. His association with the municipality would continue through the final decades of his life. This changes the way we should look at his legacy there. Jujol was not merely designing beautiful houses for individual clients. He was thinking about the town itself. Streets. Connections. Buildings. Public space. Growth. How should an agricultural village become something larger without losing the logic of its landscape? That question became particularly visible in one fascinating project.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, landowners began considering the development of the Samontà area, above the railway. Pere Negre entrusted Jujol with an urbanisation project. For years, Jujol studied the land. His proposals attempted to follow existing paths, property boundaries and natural changes in elevation rather than simply drawing an abstract geometric grid over the countryside. The plan was formally presented in 1926. It was never built. And here history becomes fascinating. Because the land did not remain agricultural forever. The future arrived -simply not the future Jujol had drawn.
After the middle of the twentieth century, Sant Joan Despí began changing dramatically. The 1953 regional plan designated land for industrial development outside Barcelona. The area that Jujol had once imagined being urbanised would eventually form part of the Fontsanta industrial zone.
Gallina Blanca was among the first major companies to establish itself there. Others followed. Factories replaced fields. Employment attracted new inhabitants, including many families arriving from other parts of the State. New neighbourhoods developed to accommodate a rapidly increasing population. Sant Joan Despí was becoming industrial. The transformation was not unique. Similar processes were changing the entire Baix Llobregat and much of metropolitan Barcelona. Agricultural land became industrial land. Villages became towns. Paths became streets. Farmhouses found themselves surrounded by apartment buildings. A landscape that had developed over centuries changed within a few decades. And Jujol's buildings remained.
This is perhaps where Jujol's importance to Sant Joan Despí becomes greater than architecture itself. His buildings became witnesses. The Torre de la Creu remembers a Sant Joan Despí in which an eccentric summer house could suddenly appear beside fields. Can Negre remembers the agricultural world of the Catalan masia while simultaneously transforming it into something fantastical.
Casa Rovira still carries decoration inspired by fields and fruit. Even Jujol's unrealised urban plans preserve evidence of a moment when the future of Sant Joan Despí had not yet been decided. Buildings can do this. They store time. Not metaphorically, but physically. A wall may survive after the field beside it disappears. A farmhouse may remain after agriculture ceases to define the local economy. An architect may die while the town continues changing around his work. Architecture becomes a form of memory that cannot easily be erased. The transformation continued.
The industrial town gradually became part of the contemporary metropolitan city. Today, someone hearing the name Sant Joan Despí may think of very different things. TV3. The Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper. FC Barcelona players arriving for training. The Fontsanta industrial area. The railway. The tram. Schools, hospitals, businesses and residential neighbourhoods. Almost none of these things belongs to Jujol's Sant Joan Despí. And yet Jujol still belongs to theirs. That is the fascinating paradox. The town changed almost beyond recognition, but the architect became one of the threads connecting its different identities. Agricultural Sant Joan Despí. Modernista Sant Joan Despí. Industrial Sant Joan Despí. Metropolitan Sant Joan Despí. They coexist in the same streets.
There is another reason Sant Joan Despí matters. It allows us to see Jujol without constantly looking over his shoulder for Gaudí. This is important. Jujol's collaborations with Gaudí were extraordinary. His contribution to works such as Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera forms an essential part of his legacy. But collaboration can sometimes cast a long shadow. The enormous international fame of Gaudí has inevitably caused many visitors to encounter Jujol first as Gaudí's collaborator. Sant Joan Despí reverses the relationship. Here we encounter Jujol as Jujol. Architect. Designer. Painter. Craftsman. Urban planner. Municipal architect. Neighbour. Here his imagination does not occupy one corner of somebody else's masterpiece. It occupies the town.
There is something else particularly appropriate about Jujol working in an agricultural town. He possessed an extraordinary ability to see possibilities in modest things. Fragments. Ceramics. Iron. Wood. Plaster. Objects and materials that other people might overlook. Today we might instinctively associate this with recycling, but Jujol's attitude was more profound than simply reusing materials. He appeared capable of recognising beauty before beauty was obvious. A broken piece was not necessarily waste. An irregularity did not necessarily require correction. An old building did not necessarily need demolition. A humble material did not need to pretend to be expensive. Transformation could begin with what already existed. Perhaps this is why his architecture feels so organic. It does not merely imitate nature. It behaves a little like nature. It adapts. It incorporates. It transforms.
Cities often preserve individual monuments while destroying the relationship that once existed between those monuments and their surroundings. Sant Joan Despí offers something more interesting. Jujol has become part of its identity.
Can Negre is now a cultural centre devoted to his legacy. His works form an architectural route through the town. His name remains attached not simply to individual buildings but to the cultural understanding of Sant Joan Despí itself. The agricultural village disappeared. The industrial town changed. The metropolitan city continues evolving. But Jujol remains. And perhaps that is the most beautiful way to understand the relationship between an architect and a place. Not as ownership. Not even as influence. But as conversation. Jujol listened to Sant Joan Despí when it was still surrounded by fields. Sant Joan Despí gave him somewhere to experiment, build, transform and imagine. Then history transformed the town in ways neither could have predicted. Factories arrived. Population grew. Fields disappeared. Television studios appeared. Footballers began training nearby. And through all those changes, Jujol's strange curves, colours, inscriptions, ironwork and fragments remained.
Today, walking through Sant Joan Despí means walking through several towns simultaneously. The agricultural town. The Modernista town. The industrial town. The metropolitan town. And somewhere between them all stands Josep Maria Jujol. Not simply as the architect who built in Sant Joan Despí. But as the architect whom Sant Joan Despí made part of itself.
More information: Jujol 140
There is another reason why Sant Joan Despí has always been much more than a place on a map to The Grandma. Part of her family lives there. Her uncle worked at Gallina Blanca, one of those factories that transformed the old agricultural town into an industrial one. He and her father even played football for the company's team.
And football would eventually become part of her own Sant Joan Despí, too. As a teenager, she played for La Llevantina, later, the club also known as Llevant-Les Planes. At a time when being a girl who wanted to play football was not always easy, she found there something extraordinarily simple that should never have been extraordinary at all: the possibility of playing.
She played in a mixed team. She was not asking to make history. She was not trying to prove anything. She was an adolescent who loved football and wanted to enjoy it under the same conditions as her teammates. Eventually, the team became boys-only. And that was the end of her football career. Life continued. But so did football.
La Llevantina eventually became Llevant-Les Planes, a club with an important place in the history of Catalan women's football. The landscape changed too. FC Barcelona built its Ciutat Esportiva in Sant Joan Despí, and beside it came the Johan Cruyff Stadium.
More than thirty years after playing on those dusty pitches, she found herself returning to almost the same territory to watch professional women's football. Sometimes history has a strange sense of geography. The girl who had once been allowed to play only until the team became exclusively male could now sit in a stadium built specifically to host, among others, one of the greatest women's football teams in the world. She would love to say that the circle has been completed. It has not.
Women's football has changed enormously, but equality is not a destination we have completely reached. There is still work to do. And perhaps that makes the journey even more meaningful. Whenever she return to Sant Joan Despí, she still remember those old dirt football pitches. She fell and left part of her knees behind. She arrived home covered in dust, scratches and what she proudly considered her battle wounds. And she was happy. Terribly happy.
Because sometimes the places that remain most deeply inside us are not the beautiful ones. They are the places where we were allowed to become ourselves. Jujol's Sant Joan Despí was a landscape of fields. Her uncle's was a landscape of factories. Hers was a landscape of dirt football pitches. Today's Sant Joan Despí has television studios, the Ciutat Esportiva and the Johan Cruyff Stadium. Different landscapes. Different generations. Different stories. And yet something remains. Jujol's buildings remain. Memory remains. And, wonderfully, so do the friends with whom she shared those football pitches all those years ago.
Perhaps places are a little like people. They change enormously and somehow remain themselves.
Today marks 147 years since the birth of Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert. Let us enjoy his legacy.
More information: The Guardian
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