Exposició "Gaudí, Pagès i l’Obrera"

As a result of the documentary research carried out, and for the first time, this exhibition explains that Gaudí built his first three buildings in Mataró: the house of Salvador Pagès (1878), the whitewash hall (1883) and the latrine building (1883); that Gaudí, then a young architect of 25 years, shows interest and contributes to improving the living and working conditions of the workers, and that none of this would have been possible without Salvador Pagès, soul and leader of the Cooperative Society L'Obrera Mataronesa, who commissions Gaudí to give shape to his cooperative ideal. Gaudí distributes the urbanization of the L'Obrera land into three well-defined spaces: the production area, the residential area and the services area. It is due to the commission of a cooperative that Gaudí builds his first house; he experiments with the development of arches as supporting elements in the whitewash hall, and uses ceramic tiles for the first time as a decorative element in the latrines. Gaudí, Pagès and L'Obrera cannot be explained without each other in what was the beautiful and ephemeral dream of the most important production cooperative in our country in the second half of the 19th century. This activity is framed within the commemoration of Gaudí Year.