His genius builder marked the so-called American Golden Age, and The New York Times announced his death, defining him as “the architect of New York.” But his first signed work was in Sabadell.
The Valencian Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908), very unknown to the general public, is the Spaniard who has had the most effective architectural projection in the world. Essentially in a United States that was skyrocketing as the leading world power: in New York, Grand Central Station, the old (and disappeared) Pennsylvania Station, the tomb of General Grant, the City Hall line and subway station, the Bridge of Queensboro or Carnegie Hall; the Boston Public Library or the Army War College in Washington. All these spaces would not exist without Guastavino.
He left Valencia for Barcelona at the age of 17, in 1859, when Cerdà's Eixample plan was approved. He studied at the School of Master Builders (a degree in Architecture did not yet exist in Barcelona) and began collaborating with the office of master builder Jeroni Granell.
His life is a novel, and it was a novel that allowed the architect Josep Llobet Bach to tie the knot and identify the first building signed by this legendary builder: it is the office house of Domènec Buxeda. Rambla de Sabadell, 1868.
“I discovered this building in 1981, having just finished my degree, when we toured the city to prepare the architectural heritage plan, but then I did not know the figure of Guastavino,” explains Llobet.
The authorship remained there for four decades, sleeping in the technical file of the city's protected urban heritage. Nobody went further or contextualized it in the master's work.
Llobet discovered Guastavino's genius in 2003 in New York, and delved deeper into his legacy. “It was when reading his life as a novel by Javier Moro, that I saw the relationship that the teacher had with the Buxedas,” he says. Guastavino's uncle – a tailor and owner of the El Águila department store in Barcelona – had ties to the Vallesan textile industry. Llobet has reviewed the file in the Sabadell Historical Archive and has discovered that it is his first signed work.
The Domènec Buxeda house had a first project, in December 1867, signed by Granell and Guastavino. The final project, presented in August 1868 and with one more floor, is already signed only by Guastavino.
The house was renovated in 1923 by the architect Francesc Nebot without modifying its essence: he reproduced the central arch in the two side doors and added a balustrade, but the rest of the façade and the structure, with its large staircase, remains the same.
Before and after this work, Guastavino collaborated on others without signing, such as l'Escola Industrial. The first that he signed after Sabadell would not be until 1870 and 1871: the renovation of the Galve house, in Sarrià, and the Julià-Vilar house, on Passeig de Gràcia.
Guastavino left for New York in 1881, two weeks before the inauguration of his sublime dome at the Teatre La Massa in Vilasar: it was the premonition of what he would build in the New World. He landed when the Statue of Liberty did not yet exist. He never returned.
There is a series on HBO that portrays the effervescence he found: The Gilded Age. The architectural firm that built the Russell palace in fiction – McKim, Mead
The volta is a technique used in the Mediterranean since Roman times, but Guastavino himself highlighted its Catalan character in a conference he offered at the invitation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1889, after the success of the Boston Library.
“The professors at the Barcelona School, one of the most illustrious in Europe, in a city where brick is used more than anywhere else in the world, did not begin to pay attention to this style until 1866 and 1868,” explained Guastavino in the MIT–. When they finally noticed it, it was only to comment in passing on its resistance and usefulness, but they did not make it a subject of study, even though they spent the day walking on roofs built in this system, proof of the little importance it had for them as science.”
The Catalan volta was that, pure mason's intuition and practice inherited over the centuries. “Despite this,” Guastavino acknowledged in his MIT lecture, “I owe everything I know about this subject to the wisdom of my professors at the Barcelona School, Joan Torras and Elies Rogent” [Torras, called the Catalan Eiffel, was decisive in the incorporation of iron in the volta].
Four years after arriving in New York, Guastavino began to patent variants of the Catalan volta that he had learned in Barcelona (and in Sabadell). It was the effective, fast and economical solution for that infinite Eixample that was the US, hungry for efficiency, speed and economy. A volta capable of opening up large interior spaces in a nation of large outdoor spaces.
“It had another great virtue – explains Llobet –: it was fireproof, an American obsession after the fires that devoured Chicago and Boston ten years before its arrival. He presented the system to New York municipal technicians by setting fire to a volta and showing that it did not burn.”
After his death, his son continued with the construction business and the Guastavino Archs continued to mark the American skyline. In New York, the Manhattan Municipal Building, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine or the elephant house at the Bronx Zoo. In Washington, the Supreme Court or the American Museum of Natural History. In Pittsburgh, Union Station. In Lincoln, the Nebraska state capitol... as well as up to a thousand churches, train stations, museums or universities (Harvard, Berkeley, Yale or Columbia).
But none as sensual as the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York. “If you stand on one side of the volta, by whispering you can converse with another person located on the opposite side, ten meters away, without those in the center finding out. They say that many New Yorkers have declared their love for these curves,” explains Llobet.
Guastavino's memory faded until the demolition of the spectacular Pennsylvania Station in 1963 raised all New York heritage alarms. Grand Central Station could not, should not, fall. “Isn't it cruel to let our city die little by little, stripped of all its proud monuments until there is nothing left of its history and beauty to inspire our children?” lamented Jacqueline Kennedy.
This is how a master builder without an architect's degree ended up marking the architecture of the 20th century empire. And it is still a splendid metaphor that the great immigrant distribution room of the mythical Ellis Island is supported by the arches of Guastavino, the Valencian emigrant who would build New York with a formula from old Rome.
Starting with Sabadell.
