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Today I once again have to remember the story of a splendid building in Barcelona that ended up disappearing: the Casa Francesc Riera. It was built by Francisco de Paula del Villar Carmona in the primitive Cortes 604 street (now Gran Vía), on the corner of the sea side, with Balmes street.
Francisco de Paula del Villar Carmona, son of Francisco de Paula del Villar Lozano, both architects, among other important jobs, had worked on the construction of the façade of the church and the chapel of the Virgin of Montserrat.
Subsequently, he only developed the project and then built the Second Mystery of Pain of the Monumental Rosary of Montserrat, in which a figure made by the sculptor Agapito Vallmitjana also stands out, which among many of the works carried out in Barcelona is the Pantheon of Bishop Urquinaona, built in 1886.
Throughout her career, Paula del Villar Carmona was closely related to that area of the city, where she not only built the Casa Francesc Riera on the corner of Balmes Gran Vía on the sea side, but also, crossing the Gran Vía, she also raised the building of Gas Lebón and, a few meters further towards Besòs, Casa Climent Arola, at Rambla de Catalunya 27.
The building was of a spectacular nature that was not well known at that time, since the finishes of the closure of the house were continually admired by the people of Barcelona due to the height reached by the two rounded pinnacles at the ends of the chamfered façade.
With a height of five stories, the central façade was topped at the ends of the lower floors by two rows of viewpoints, matching the final towers of the crown of the building.
The two corner towers framed a stone balustrade, adorned with stone figures also recalling in small format the two main towers.
Regarding the balconies of the lower floors, the rest of the façade corresponded to a symmetrical figure in the corner with five equal balconies on the first four floors, three running in the center and at the ends, individual balconies, these matching the on the top floor with the railing flush with the façade.
The façade was larger on Cortes street, which had four exits with continuous balconies on the first four floors and the fifth with the same structure as the central façade. On Balmes street, the building consisted of only two balconies following the same distribution as the rest of the building.
The ground floor, with the same symmetry, adapted the doors of the commercial premises to the structure of the façade, except for the chamfer, which had the entrance door to the building in the center and on its sides there was a stone panel with figures and a door of the commercial premises on the outside.
During the 65 years of existence of this house, it contemplated how the tracks and the railway that ran along Balmes street were buried, as well as the disappearance of the trams.
But, like many other buildings of the time, it suffered from the constant demand for housing in the 1950s, with the rush to erect new buildings. So the house was torn down in 1956. In its place a new, more severe-looking building with a greater height was built to house another new hive.
Buildings that were enlarged by the classic attics in the central part and that gave it a similar appearance to all those built at the time.
They followed the aesthetic criteria of a simplistic and boring architecture, without any ideas that attracted attention, with a rectilinear construction typical of those times.
It is worth remembering other examples such as the Banco Español de Crédito in Plaza de Catalunya, the headquarters of the Bank of Spain in the same square, the Banco Vitalicio and the Caja Rural in Paseo de Gracia and thus a large number of buildings that showed a lack of ideas of those architects whose only ambition was to make money.
