On Sant Ignasi's Square in Manresa, David Closes sets perforated-metal volumes against the scarred stone wall of a demolished baroque church, the new entrance to the Baroque Museum of Catalonia.
A coincidence sits at the root of this project. Between 2003 and 2011, David Closes converted the Sant Francesc convent in Santpedor into an auditorium, working on a complex where only the church survived and the cloister had vanished. The commission in Manresa reversed that condition exactly. Here the baroque church of the Old Saint Ignatius College was demolished long ago, leaving the Jesuit wings ranged around their cloister and a single scarred wall where the nave once stood. Both buildings, as Closes writes, were amputated of one of two essential elements.
That surviving wall is the project's true subject. Its sandstone face still carries the footprints of the demolished church, ghost arches and a stone cross pressed into the masonry like a relief. Rather than restore or hide it, the new volumes stand just in front, close enough to form the building's west face on Sant Ignasi's Square yet spaced to keep the imprints in view. The wall reads as both ruin and exhibit, the first thing the museum shows before a visitor steps inside.
The added mass is clad in perforated metal, a pale silver skin that folds, cants and cantilevers over a glazed ground floor. Steel struts prop the upper boxes above the entrance, and a low expanded-metal counter wraps the plaza at street level. Against the warm grain of the old stone, the panels stay deliberately abstract, a screen that catches light and dissolves at dusk. Board-formed concrete carries the loads behind it, its tie holes and timber grain left raw.
Inside, the contrast sharpens. The cloister keeps its groin vaults and heavy stone columns, while a run of orange steel cuts through the white plaster as ramp, bench and balustrade in one continuous gesture. The colour returns in the vaulted galleries above, where an orange floor and folded sheet-metal walls thread between rough limestone and a small original window. New and old never blur; each makes the other legible.
The accesses are conceived as a route rather than a lobby. Closes leads visitors past the barrel vaults and the footprints on the partitioning wall, then opens framed views outward to Sant Ignasi's Square, the gothic basilica of La Seu, the Santa Caterina defence tower and the mountain of Montserrat. At its highest point the path ends in a bleacher set above the city, turning circulation into an overlook.
The result re-establishes links with the past of the Jesuit complex and with Manresa around it. The museum now holds the Baroque Museum of Catalonia and the city's history collection, but the larger argument is about the missing church, present everywhere as absence. Closes lets the demolition stand as the building's defining fact, then builds the entrance as its frame.
