LIVING

The new museum is unique, a building designed for living that has been adapted for another purpose: the contemplation of art. After extensive restoration to recover many lost features, the building maintains the aura of the bourgeois home it once was, including a beautifully conserved rococo music room, the family’s large salon for entertaining guests and the billiards room flanked by two imposing stained-glass windows.

Re-hung in the 2,700 square metres of the first two floors of the Casa Garriga Nogués, the Godia collection now has room to breathe, and the curators have had the opportunity to explore the art within a new context. The challenge of the renovation was to respect the architectural integrity of the original building, while providing a modern exhibition space suitable for displaying the art, according to Sara Puig. The architects, led by Jordi Garcés, have managed to get this balancing act right: the building is, itself, a grand artistic expression, which never overshadows the art it contains. The architects have managed to integrate the different spaces provided by the house into a double tour of the collection: the first is circular, around the stairway—where the fantastic collection of Spanish 19th-century art has been placed—the other linear, a walk through the different rooms, some of which give way to hidden corners where the visitor can face the art in an intimate moment of contemplation.

Now that the Francisco Godia collection has found an ideal space to be shown, its future is to “keep filling in the gaps,” said Puig. Even a collection like this is never truly ‘complete’—a good collection is organic and keeps growing, reflecting that art is an endeavour that is always moving forward.

To highlight this, the Fundació commissioned the Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias to celebrate the opening of the new building with a new piece for the patio of the Casa Garriga Nogués. Iglesias’s contribution is both “a sculpture and an architectural intervention, a free interpretation of the possibilities of the patio space that comments on the original vision of the Eixample,” according to Puig.

She also noted that there is something pleasingly circular about the fact that the newest addition to this historic collection is by a young Spanish sculptor, as Francisco Godia’s first acquisitions were of contemporary Spanish sculpture. Wherever he is now, Francisco Godia is surely looking down on his collection, now magnificently re-housed, with an immense smile of satisfaction.

Fundació Francisco Godia, (Casa Garriga Nogués), Diputació 250; Tel. 93 272 3180; www.fundacionfgodia.org