Institut Pere Mata, Reus: beauty as part of the cure
Reus, Catalonia · 1897–1908
The Institut Pere Mata in Reus is a psychiatric hospital designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner in 1897, opened in 1900 and still at work. One of its buildings, Pavilion 6 - the Pavelló dels Distingits - no longer takes patients and is open to visitors. Its mosaics, stained glass and painted ceilings were part of the plan for care: in the words of the declaration that made the pavilion a protected monument in 2013, “the aesthetic condition is also a curative condition”.
At the end of the nineteenth century, patients with mental illness in Reus were kept at ca l’Agulla, an institution in the town with neither hygiene nor treatment. The town’s forensic doctor, Emili Briansó, set out to replace it. In 1896 thirty-five merchants, professionals, landowners and industrialists founded a company for it, the Sociedad Manicomio de Reus. The Catalan heritage inventory records its aim: a modern hospital “at the level of the best asylums in Europe”. Its chairman, Pau Font de Rubinat, knew Domènech i Montaner and brought him in. The hospital took the name of Pere Mata i Fontanet (1811–1877), a physician born in Reus and regarded as the founder of professional forensic medicine in Spain.
The site followed a medical thesis on the aesthetics of asylums, Estética de los manicomios: they should stand apart from the town but within reach, in fresh air, away from damp, with good views. The company chose a hill at Monterols, outside Reus. Domènech’s general plan set the pavilions symmetrically among gardens and walks, like a small town, each with its own use; patients were placed by illness, sex and social class. Building began in 1898, and the hospital opened on 1 March 1900. The chapel and some of the pavilions were never built; Domènech used the plan of pavilions again at the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona. Even the boundary wall was set down in a ditch, so that it kept the patients in without hiding the gardens from them.
Pavilion 6 was for the patients who paid the most. It was designed as one building but built in three stages: first the two towers at either end, known as the chalets, in 1901–1902 and 1903–1904, then the central body between them, in 1905–1908. The 2013 declaration gives the reason: the hospital urgently needed to take in important patients, who would bring the money without which the whole project could fail. They found electric light and running water, the best comfort of the day.
The common rooms are on the ground floor - a sitting room, a dining room and a billiard room - each two storeys high. The sitting room rises to a gallery under pointed windows of stained glass. Peacocks spread their tails in the corners of its ceiling, and at the centre, above a ribbon lettered Pere Mata, is the emblem of the hospital: a woman pouring oil into a lamp, to keep the flame of reason alight. In the dining room, tiles of oranges on their branches run along the walls beside the dressers. In the billiard room, benches are built into the wooden panelling under a ceiling ribbed in green.
The sitting room seen from the gallery. The dining room: dressers either side of a stained-glass door, tiles of oranges along the wall. The billiard room.
Domènech did not stop at the walls. With his draughtsmen Josep Triadó and Lluís Bru, he designed doors and windows, grilles and railings, capitals, tiles, furniture, stained glass and lamps. Some of his main collaborators worked on the pavilion: Bru, already at work on the hospital; Joan Paradís for sgraffito; the cabinetmaker Josep Prat; the stained-glass makers Rigalt, Granell i Cia. So did three Barcelona firms: Santamaria for the lamps, Escofet for the cement floor tiles, Pujol i Bausis of Esplugues for the ceramic dados.
In the vestibule, a word is set into the mosaic floor: Salve. It is a Latin greeting, from a verb that means “to be well”.
By the entrance: a mosaic of flowers tied with a ribbon, set into the brick wall. Stained glass under brick arches. Salve, in the mosaic floor of the vestibule.
Other details show a building made for the people who lived in it. The staircase has no open well, to prevent accidents, and where it could be done, stained glass on an iron core takes the place of bars. The decoration speaks to the patients too. The heritage inventory records tiles that read se refaran, “they will recover”, and renascitur, “it is reborn”, and tiles painted with pansies: in Catalan the flower and the word for thought are the same, pensament.
The bedrooms are on the ground, first and second floors, along galleries that open onto the garden through windows and serve as corridors. Bathrooms are at the ends of the galleries, and each room had its own lavatory. The rooms keep their original furniture: a wardrobe inlaid with roses, a bed, a small desk by the window. In one bedroom, trees are painted around the walls, their trunks rising to a canopy just under the ceiling.
The richest decoration went to those who paid, but not all of it. The pavilions for charity patients and third-class boarders, finished in 1902, carry ceramic panels designed by Josep Triadó: allegories of study and work, angels, faith, hope and charity.
A bedroom with trees painted around the walls. A wardrobe inlaid with roses, under a frieze of roses.
Pavilion 6 housed patients for eighty years, until 1986. Public visits began in 1995, and in 2000 the hospital handed the building to the city of Reus for cultural and tourist use. It was restored between 2005 and 2012 and declared a monument of national interest in 2013. Around it, the Institut Pere Mata still works as a psychiatric hospital.
The patients are treated in other buildings now. On the ceiling of the sitting room, the woman is still pouring oil into her lamp.
The Pavelló dels Distingits is open to visitors, with an audio guide; hours and tickets: Reus Turisme.
Sources: Inventari del Patrimoni Arquitectònic de Catalunya, "Institut Pere Mata"; Generalitat de Catalunya, Acord GOV/101/2013 (BOE, 1 August 2013); Ajuntament de Reus, "Pavelló número 6 dels distingits"; Pobles de Catalunya, "Institut Pere Mata. Pavelló dels Distingits"; Viquipèdia: Institut Pere Mata, Pere Mata i Fontanet. Photographs: MYT'.
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