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The Botines house or Fernández y Andrés house is a modernist-style building located in the Spanish city of León, capital of the province of the same name. Originally it was a commercial warehouse and private residence. Built and designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí between 1891 and 1892, it is one of his three works outside Catalonia, next to the Episcopal Palace of Astorga —also in the province of León— and El Capricho de Comillas, in Cantabria.
It is located next to the Palacio de los Guzmanes —headquarters of the León Provincial Council— and next to Plaza de Santo Domingo, the meeting place between the old town and the expansion. It was declared a Historical Monument of Cultural Interest in 1969 and fully restored in 1996. It currently houses the Casa Botines Gaudí Museum managed by the Castilla y León Social Work Foundation (FUNDOS).
The term Casa Botines derives from the surname of the founder of the company, Juan Homs y Botines, a businessman and merchant of Catalan origin settled in the capital of Leon. His partners Mariano Andrés González-Luna and Simón Fernández Fernández were responsible for commissioning the house from Gaudí.
This work belongs to Gaudí's neo-Gothic period (1888-1898), a stage in which the architect was inspired above all by medieval Gothic art, which he assumed in a free, personal way, trying to improve its structural solutions. Neo-Gothic was at that time one of the most successful historicist styles, especially as a result of the theoretical studies of Viollet-le-Duc. Gaudí studied Catalan, Balearic and Roussillon Gothic in depth, as well as Leonese and Castilian Gothic in his stays in León and Burgos, and came to the conviction that it was an imperfect style, half resolved. In his works from this period he eliminated the need for buttresses by using ruled surfaces and suppressed excessive cresting and fretwork.
This work is registered as a monument declared in the register of Assets of Cultural Interest of Spanish heritage with the code RI-51-0003826.
History
In the city of León, in the second third of the XIX century, a garment shop run by the Catalan merchant Juan Homs settled and Botines, dedicated to the purchase and sale of securities. Over time, said merchant formed a partnership with one of his employees, Simón Fernández Fernández, later married to one of his sister-in-laws. Fernández established himself with the same loan business in the Plaza de Don Gutierre, then the Boteros square, and ended up associating with another former Botines employee, Mariano Andrés González-Luna, with which the original firm Homs y Fernández became Fernández and Andrés, residing in the Plaza Mayor.
Its financial work as a banking house was combined with that of a textile store. Their commercial activities related them to the Catalan manufacturers Güell, Parellada y Cía, and it was the businessman Eusebi Güell who recommended the architect Gaudí to carry out the construction of a new house for the business in the Plaza de San Marcelo. The property took the name of Botines after the original promoter of the company, although it is also known as the Fernández y Andrés house. On the death of Simón Fernández in 1891, his sons José and Aquilino Fernández Riu succeeded him in the company. At that time Gaudí was working in Astorga, on the work of the episcopal palace (1889-1893), for which reason he accepted the commission due to its closeness and stylistic consonance, although some scholars have raised the possibility that the commission for the episcopal palace and Casa Botines will be held at the same time; or even that Botines was prior to the Episcopal Palace.
Construction
The plot on which the building would be located, 2390.5 m², was purchased by Fernández and Andrés from the Duke of Uceda, Francisco de Borja Téllez -Girón and Fernández de Velasco, and their two sisters, Rosario and María de la Piedad, from whom the León Provincial Council had already acquired the adjoining Guzmanes palace in 1882. The purchase price was 17,000 pesetas. Originally The project was the subject of a bitter litigation promoted by the city council at the request of the neighbor from the west, Eleuterio González del Palacio, who did not welcome the approved implementation, for being an attack against public decoration and leaving the palace façade without showing off. This lawsuit would be linked to the assignment of the land and the domain of the part of the plot in the Plaza de San Marcelo. The judicial resolution, of 1891, granted the owners an area of 800 m².
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The architect sent the plans in December 1891 and spent the winter preparing the work. With the arrival of good weather, Gaudí moved to León with his team of teachers and officers, where there were no specialized workers, but there were stonemasons who worked on the restoration of the cathedral. The works began on January 4, 1892. The construction was surrounded by intrigues and bad omens, which Gaudí settled by asking for all contrary technical reports to be written and signed so that, once the house was finished, they could be displayed in a visible place in the hall.
Send me these technical reports in writing and I'll put them in some frames in the lobby of the house when it's finished.
In any case, Gaudí did not have much time to deal with the discrepancies that arose, as he had been absorbed in Barcelona studying the new structure that he planned to give to the Sagrada Família and the Teresianas College. These attentions forced him to space out his visits to the work, which effectively replaced the most frequent ones from his manager Claudi Alsina, bearer of his instructions. The team also included Antonio Cantó, in charge of stonework; Mariano Padró, masonry; and Juan Coll, carpentry. On the other hand, the workshop carpentry was entrusted to the Barcelona firm Casas, Planas y Cía —later Casas y Bardés—; the cast iron columns were commissioned from Hijos de Ignacio Damians, also from Barcelona; the wrought iron main door was made by the workshops of Joan Oñós, also from Barcelona; the basement gate, the railings and the lift were made by Kessler, Laviada y Cía, from Gijón; the decorated ceilings were by Hermanos Vila; and the bars on the windows of the basement of Bernardo Valero, from León.
The construction was completed after ten months in November 1892, a notable event due to the degree of craftsmanship that most of its elements present and which surprised the people of Leon at the time. The image of Saint George and the Dragon was placed after the end of the works, on November 15, 1893.
Later evolution
At the beginning of the XX century, Mariano Andrés bought part of his partner's business from his descendants, José and Aquilino Fernández Riu. Upon his death in 1911, ownership of the house passed half to his widow, Leonarda Lescún Lubén, and the other half to his children, Mariano and Rogelia Andrés Lescún.
In 1929 the building was acquired by the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de León. The purchase from the heirs of Mariano Andrés was made for 750,000 pesetas. In 1931 this entity carried out a small remodeling, in which the wooden mezzanine in the center of the ground floor and the central staircase were removed, while the wooden counters for others made of marble and glass.
There was a new reform in 1953, which was controversial because it broke with the original design, since it eliminated seven of the 28 pillars of the basement. The remodeling was commissioned to the architect Luis Aparicio Guisasola, who to provide more space on the ground noble suppressed the columns by horizontal metal beams; in the semi-basement the columns were lined with rectangular wooden plates, in front of the previous cylindrical metal shaft; and on the main floor the columns were lined with white marble and the capitals were hidden under a false plaster ceiling.
On August 24, 1969, the Botines house was declared by Decree 1794/1969 of the Council of Ministers as a national historical-artistic monument, along with sixteen other works by Gaudí.
The building was owned by Caja León until it absorbed four other savings banks in 1990 and became Caja España, an entity that six years later would once again undertake restoration work on the building to return it to its original state. After these works, which earned him the Europa Nostra award in 1998, the Botines building became the headquarters of the savings bank. In the new rehabilitation, carried out by the architects Félix Compadre Díez and Mariano Díez Sáenz de Miera, an effort was made to respect the Gaudinian opus as much as possible, while seeking to combine as much as possible the physical values of the building with utility and functionality. Thus, the various original elements suppressed or transformed in the previous reform were recovered, through their reconstruction or recovery.
After the merger of Caja España and Caja Duero, the Fundación España-Duero was created in 2016, and the Casa Botines was converted into a museum, the Casa Botines Gaudí Museum, which was inaugurated on April 23, 2017. The new museum allows a visit to the Gaudinian building open to the public for the first time, and in its rooms various objects and works of art from the Foundation are exhibited, including paintings by Casas, Sorolla, Madrazo, Tàpies, etc. In 2018 the Spain Foundation -Duero changed its name to Fundación Obra Social de Castilla y León (FUNDOS).
Description
Gaudi's project was a building with four winds in the neo-Gothic style, resolved with his unmistakable modernist stamp. The building was used to house the offices and warehouses of the weaving business on its ground floors (semi-basement and ground floors), and at the same time had housing on the upper floors: on the first two floors of the owners and on the two upper floors for rent (four per floor); Finally, there is an attic —where the concierge's house was—, with a four-sided roof. It is a double roof, since its height is equivalent to two floors, designed as insulation for the building and, at the same time, thanks to its skylights, as an inlet of air and light into the interior.
The floor plan of the building is trapezoidal, due to the shape of the site. It has four façades: north, 35.5 m; south, from 28.5 m; east, from 25 m; and west, of 20 m. Each entrance had a purpose: the main door, in the Plaza de San Marcelo, led to the store and offices; the one after the warehouse; and the lateral ones to the floors.
Outside
The construction was carried out with walls of solid limestone stonework, arranged in the form of padding. The rough carving of the stone gives the building a rustic appearance, which accentuates its historicist appearance. The building is flanked by four towers Cylindrical on corbels, topped with conical-shaped spires made of slate, culminating in a weather vane —the highest in the shape of a Maltese cross. The roof is also made of slate. The house is surrounded by a ditch with a wrought iron grate, with a latticework of spirals arranged in the shape of a lozenge. The windows are sash, with inclined projections to retain snow, very common in winter in León. All the windows are lobed, except those on the crest and upper turrets.
Gaudí made the moat in continuous trenches filled with concreted masonry, as was customary in Catalonia, for which reason he received criticism from various engineers who claimed that this system was not valid for that terrain, so that the foundations ran seriously danger. It was because of these criticisms that he made his famous comment about framing the technical reports received.
The façade is in the Gothic style, as Gaudí tried to make it adapt to its surroundings, especially the cathedral and the Guzmanes palace. Thus, he designed the doors and windows with lobed arches, and accentuated the horizontality of the façade with well-marked cornices. The main door is made of wrought iron, with a seven-lobed voussoir, where the figure of a lion stands out, as a tribute to the city. Formerly it had the inscription Fernández y Andrés on the tympanum, which disappeared after being acquired by Caja León. Above this door is a sculpture of Saint George and the dragon, designed in Barcelona by Llorenç Matamala and executed in situ by the stonecutter Antonio Cantó, 2.9 m high and made with stone from Gerona. The model for the saint was Matamala himself and for the dragon one of the gargoyles from the apse of the Sagrada Família. On top of this statue is a clock. Of the rest of the portals, it is worth noting on the two sides some wrought iron finials with the initials of the owner and the founder of the company, M-A (Mariano Andrés) and J-H (Joan Homs).
In 1953, during some works to replace the statue of Saint George with one of the Virgen del Camino, patron saint of the Kingdom of León, a lead tube containing a series of documents was found behind the statue related to the work, such as the plans of the building signed by Gaudí, the property contract for the site, the certificate of completion of the works and some local newspapers. The original statue was replaced in 1956 by a replica carved by Andrés Seoane on a cast by Rafael García Morales.
Inside
The interior of the building presents an original technical concept alien to any system of the time, since Gaudí tested some innovative techniques that he would later apply in his work. On the ground floor and in the semi-basement, he developed an open floor plan, replacing the traditional load-bearing walls with a set of 28 cast iron pillars 20 cm in diameter, that make these two levels open spaces with which it achieves maximum spatial utility, while achieving better natural lighting and air renewal. All this would allow him to apply the same formula in the Milà house, although this time with stone pillars.
For a more rational use of space, Gaudí divided the interior floors into 96 modules (12 on the long façades and 8 on the short ones), creating a grid that allowed him to align the walls, place the pillars and locate the stairwells and light wells.
In contrast to the Gothic style of the façade, in the interior he designed some finishes in the purest modernist style, where the joinery work, the stained glass windows, the sgraffito and the wrought iron components, such as railings, handles and peepholes, stand out. which combine functionality and aesthetics. On the main floor there are stained glass windows that represent the Judicial Districts of León, Savings, Industry, Commerce, Labor and Agriculture, as well as the shield of León repeated eleven times, an original work by David López Merille restored in 1996 by Luis García Zurdo.
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