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Looking inside from outside, and vice versa. What windows only
allow the glance to do, foyers allow the whole body to do. A
semi-public zone, an airlock between inside and outside that
makes the transition something one can physically sense. Foyers
are the stages for grand performances. People who moments ago
were mere passers-by in the street are suddenly transformed into
customers, hotel guests and visitors. Or occupants who want to
be taken from the street to their apartment door. In the three-
sectioned residential complex Edifici d'habitatges, built by
Antoni de Morages Gallissà and Francisco Riba de Sales in his
brutalist phase, foyers are used as architectural elements.
Generously-dimensioned, harmoniously designed halls provide
access to the apartments on every level: orange and white tiled
ceilings, red-shaded lamps sprouting like mushrooms from the
rough concrete columns, dark stone floors and brick walls. The
foyers extend through every level - subtly echoing the cityscape
that visitors were in just a few moments beforehand. The
entrance to the Edificio Muntaner and the building on the Via
Augusta dissolve spatial borders and extend the cityscape into
the building's interior: with glass entrance doors, reflective
surfaces, and architectural elements such as benches, ramps,
pillars and staircases. In contrast, passers-by in the building
on the c/ Marià Cubi enter an intermediate space in the middle
of nowhere - they glide through the hall, in a situation very
reminiscent of the space station in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A
Space Odyssey.
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