Santa & Cole, Ediciones de diseño S.A.

The principal objective of this monograph, the result of over five years of research, is to analyze the complex relations that José Antonio Coderch (1913-1984) established between objects and the architectural space. For this, the main elements that he designed are carefully reviewed - the folding louvre, the plate chimneys and the wooden slat lamp, together with the built-in furnishings -, associating them with three architectural works with which they establish relations of intimate homology: the house for the Social Marine Institute in Barceloneta, the Tàpies house and the family's ancestral home in Espolla (Girona). Numerous images and plans of some of his most recognized works accompany the text, illustrating the arguments set out in the different essays.

The study of these elements reveals a critical aspect which remained almost unknown and which now appears to be essential not just to know his work better but also, above all, to measure the scope of his cultural significance and to give him an appropriate setting.

This book is thus the result of crossing research on the objects with an analysis of the architectural work of Coderch, with the aim of selecting those works which condense the essential nature of his concern for objects and for the inhabited space. This selection shows that the elements that he defines are conceptually inseparable from his architecture, being key components which describe a paradigmatic universe and, therefore, contain the imaginative substratum of his technical and artistic activity. They are all related to the warmth and light (of fire or of the sun), both in their physical and thermodynamic acceptance and in their archetypal acceptance, linked to the anthropological phenomenon of the habitat. Chimneys, lamps and louvres are thus bound together and to his architecture by a magical, mysterious and fascinating relationship of analogy.

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