Restoration of the Sant Salvador Pavilion at the Hospital de Sant Pau

It is used as a museum about architect Lluís Domènech i Muntaner, the Catalan Art Nouveau style and his works. The museum was envisioned as having a twofold purpose: the restoration of the building itself and the interior content, central dragon and the museum exhibition. The building has a ground floor, a first floor, and an attic. There is a central bay in each floor called the “Sickroom” with a circular room next to it called the “Day Room” and a hexagonal room on the other side. In back is a rear wing which is connected via a “transitional” area. In the “Sickroom”, the walls and upper ribs on the vaults were structurally reinforced. The floor level was raised and underfloor heating, electrical wiring, and signage for the museum fitted in it. The floor was finished by manufacturing and installing 54,000 pieces of hexagonal hydraulic tiles handcrafted to be identical to the original floor. The room as a whole, its walls and ceilings were all restored with patterns made using new ceramic pieces which were also handmade and installed using traditional methods. All told, it has 40 different types and 15,000 new pieces. In the “Day Room” (called thus because light streams in from the windows all day long), the entire ceiling of the dome was restored. In the hexagonal room, the former elevator was removed, the ceiling was reconstructed by adding new ceramic cladding that did not previously exist, and a new metal spiral staircase clad with marble was added and attached to a new elevator to connect both stories. Prior to this work, vaults were torn down and the pressures from the building itself were buttressed with reinforcements around the perimeter. The original stone spiral staircase was restored with the addition of new enclosures. All the walls not clad in glazed ceramic were covered with aerial lime stucco pigmented and applied in the traditional way. In the central bay on the ground floor, where the museum display cases are located, underground galleries were dug out and built to conceal all the HVAC, electricity and data systems, and underfloor heating was also built into the new slab and finished with technical micro-cement. The transitional area between the two floors was restored, and in the rear section prior structural reinforcement was added since the walls were badly damaged by the interventions added over the years. A second elevator was installed and the rooms in addition to the museum, restrooms and storage were fitted out.