Emili Donato Exhibition. Architecture and urban planning ★★★✩✩
Location: Barcelona, Etsab. Diagonal, 649. Date: Until October 26
Environmental urgency, strict regulations, the understandable discredit of certain iconic excesses and the usual economic restrictions condition current architecture. They do it with greater severity than in other times, marked by more open horizons. Consequently, today there are few new buildings that surprise us with their expressiveness, their formal expansion and their capacity to generate an urban landmark and build a city.
Emili Donato, who at almost ninety years old retains an enviable vitality, produced some of his most relevant works long ago, when Barcelona was awakening from Franco's slumber and everything seemed within the reach of an uninhibited architect. This is how the Escola Tècnica Superior d’ Arquitectura of Barcelona (ETSAB) now reminds us, which reviews his career with an exhibition in the lobby designed by Coderch de Sentmenat. Those who know him will not find any great surprises, although his work is captured through not widely publicized snapshots of Donato himself, which attest to his photography skills, in addition to those already known as an excellent draftsman, architect and painter. But for younger people it can be revealing.
A building like that of the residence for the elderly in La Teixonera (1988-92), with its curved floor plan that adapts to the uneven orography of the neighborhood, its large central drum with elegant rhythm of windows, its porches, viewpoints and patios , and his characteristic work seen, constitutes one of the most illustrative examples of the freedom of the designer Donato, of his monumental dimension, not related to the previous burdensome Francoist monumentalism, but with another of a more genuinely classical and civic nature.
At the CAP in Cornellà (1987-92), this ambition is expressed with equal intensity, but in a more contemporary tone, due to its geometric and abstract nature, through which a singular work is created, a cube divided by a diagonal, half space for services. and half empty under a triangular canopy of great formal power.
Donato has had the ambition of the greats. And not only because he showed early confidence in the Eixample when he designed the residential building on Rosselló Street (1964); or because in his single-family home in L’Ametlla de Mar (1965-66) echoes of Le Corbusier or Bonet Castellana resounded; or because the order of Louis Kahn's Salk Institute resonates in the 24 homes in Igualada (1981-82); or because his love for the curve evokes the language of Scarpa or Botta... Also because his lack of inhibition could lead him to projects such as the unborn Gavà cemetery (1989), a ziggurat with five floors joined by a spiral ramp in the central cylinder, by which the deceased had to be taken to their final resting place.
Donato, as some of his colleagues say, did not hold back. It is worth reviewing his work, perhaps unrepeatable today. The only problem is that you have to hurry: this exhibition closes this Thursday, the 26th.
