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The Barcelona Higher School of Commerce was opened in 1872 in a modest building built on Tallers Street. But the progression of student growth meant that little by little the building became too small, so the authorities thought about moving it to an area where the center could operate more widely.
This circumstance led to its transfer in 1891 to a five-story building, located at 49 Balmes Street, next to Consejo de Ciento.
A building that had housed the Artistic Center since 1886, with a set of exhibition halls and painting and sculpture workshops. Now, with the continuous changes in the decisions of the politicians of the time, it became the Barcelona Higher School of Commerce.
The new building with a large interior space could easily accommodate a larger number of students interested in learning the new commercial techniques of that time.
It had a façade with large windows that gave light to the interior of the classrooms. With a rectangular line and lightly decorated, they highlighted the central window on the second floor, in which a sculptural figure of the spring dedicated to Mercury stood out.
On the upper floor, possibly because it was dedicated to classrooms, the windows facing the street had a difference with the lower windows, since instead of having two leaves they had become four. This construction was in many cases due to the fact that, since air conditioning did not exist in those times and the double windows were very large and took up a lot of space when opened, these windows caused less inconvenience.
The dedication of the building to teaching was the cause of some very serious events occurring during a student strike. In November 1912, during a demonstration on the occasion of a teaching strike, a group of students not only attacked the façade of the building with stones, breaking the glass of the large windows on the first floor, but also attacked the director of the school. center.
The changes that began to occur in the middle of the 20th century, when the original University of Barcelona ran out of space to provide as much teaching as the population needed, led to the transfer of some subjects to the university area of Pedralbes in 1961.
This transfer had repercussions on the old Higher School of Commerce, which was closed and the building was demolished. The center was moved to the new building of the new University, converted into the School of Higher Commercial Studies.
It is a shame that there is no data on the construction of the building or its history as an Artistic Center. The data that is known about the Art center is through the Royal Artistic Circle of Barcelona, but that is another story, since its first building was installed in the Canonja to later go on a tour of the Gran Vía, the Rambla, Plaza de Catalunya and, finally, settling definitively at the Pignatelli Palace, located on Arcs Street, but this deserves another story.
