L’arquitectura del Liceu

“A work cannot be considered definitively finished until everything that has been done, developed and learned in the long process of project and direction of the works cannot be transmitted and offered to colleagues everywhere and of the time that is like a professional legacy ”. This phrase, often said by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, perfectly defines the purpose of this book, also in this desire to close the essence of our work and, at the same time, to serve it to anyone who may be interested. The edition was bilingual, in Catalan and English.

The edition is made up of three well-defined blocks. The first of these is the historical study of the location on La Rambla, the pre-existence and the construction and evolution of the theater building until the day of the fire, it also includes everything we have been able to find and analyze around the proposals and attempts at transformation that were not carried out during all this time.

The second block deals with the new theater, the building, its meaning and significance in the history of interventions in the Architectural Heritage to the present day and in the extensive history of the theatrical typology that begins in the discovery of the classical architecture in the renaissance. There is also in this great chapter a comparative study of the twenty opera houses of the “family” of the Liceu.

In the third block there is a review of the new “theatrical construction trades” that have come into play throughout the project and work process. Although before our grandparents talked about the particularities of the guilds of construction that became part of a particularly complex building, now these “guilds” are disciplines of another nature: the complexity of the structures and the design of the facilities. Yes, but also stage design, acoustics and broadcasting systems, security, furniture and lighting design, ornamental reproduction techniques, the reconstruction process and the coordination of all these such specific tasks.