ABSTRACT
In the early 1930s, the Catalan physician Lluís Sayé (1888–1975) and GATCPAC, a group of Catalan modern architects strongly connected with Le Corbusier, designed a tuberculosis dispensary in the Raval, one of Barcelona’s poorest districts. This chapter shows how Sayé and the GATCPAC purveyed different foreign models in order to devise the dispensary and to improve urban health in Barcelona. Dissatisfied with the “Northern European” model, GATCPAC first contemplated the architectural models from both the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Yet, in the end, the dispensary was built according to the “Mediterranean” model, a sort of cultural melting pot of Southern architecture. In this search for a best model, identity politics, ideologies and avant-garde discourses of modernity (modernist architecture) enmeshed with left-leaning social policies and medical debates on how best to fight tuberculosis. The “result,” the Barcelona tuberculosis dispensary opened in 1937, with the Spanish Civil War already in full swing. This mixture of adaptation and innovation led to something new that can only be understood as the product of a specific political, social and cultural urban milieu and its interurban network.
