History

The Roger de Llúria building, like its neighbour the Jaume I building, was originally built and used as a military barracks. Analysis of four consecrated designs at the Jaume I barracks, plus the one corresponding to Roger de Llúria, lead us to believe that these undocumented designs are two intermediate designs between the first project, and that of colonel Rueda, of 1847, and some later adjustments, done in January 1879.

In 1868, the old military garrison was demolished and four years later, the Ciutadella park was created. In compensation, the Ministry of War required the construction of the two military barracks, Jaume I and Roger de Llúria (which were finished by 1887) and some annexed military pavilions.

The Ciutadella barracks were conceived on the basis of fixed modules, with quite elongated rectangular-shaped wings, for the ground floor and a further two storeys, with a pitched roof, organised around a porticoed rectangular patio. Over a century ago, the Ciutadella barracks introduced the characteristic shapes of the central Eixample in a suburban landscape.

Renovation

The renovation works on the Roger de Llúria building began in 1997. It was inaugurated in the year 2000, and initially, Law studies moved here. The Jaume I and Roger de Llúria buildings are currently host to social sciences and humanities.

The surface area of the Roger de Llúria building plot is 8,997 m2, with a constructed surface of 5,292 m2 and a renovated surface area of 26,957 m2. The team of MBM Arquitectos, SA, Josep Maria Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay, was commissioned to perform the renovation. This building was awarded the 2001 Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for architecture and urban planning and was a finalist at the 44th edition of the ADI-FAD prizes for architecture and interior design.

From outside, the Roger de Llúria building conserves the same rectangular proportions as the Jaume I building, but is different inside due to a ring-shaped floor that configures a central patio which is as wide as an Eixample street (80 metres). Within this area two new constructions were erected: one with a glass façade, where there are large lecture halls; and another that houses the lecturers’ offices and was built as a body suspended above the patio. This latter construction has four floors and a façade which is crowned in wood and has large horizontal cuts in the windows. The patio is located at basement level and is covered by an aluminium, glass and iron cover, whose saw tooth structure allows natural light to be harnessed.

At one end of the interior patio of the Roger de Llúria building we find the Memorial in homage to the lecturers who were removed from Catalan universities at the beginning of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1940). With the creation of this memorial, UPF wished to pay homage to the nigh-on one hundred and twenty lecturers of Autonomous University of Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra among them,) who, with the end of the Civil War, were relieved of their teaching charges, which, for many of them, meant setting off on the log road to exile.

The Memorial consists of a 4-metre wide circular glass box of 40 centimetres in height. The upper lid is made up of three glass laminates in the middle of which in circular form are written the names of those to whom homage is paid, and the lower cover is made of translucent glass. The names of the lecturers are successively lit up by a permanent ray of light which moves clockwise in a circular direction.