April 6, 2011

Course 

THE CATHEDRAL OF PAMPLONA. A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

The outbuildings of community life from the 12th century to the present day: use and function

Mr Javier Martínez de Aguirre.
Complutense University of Madrid

The Pamplona cathedral complex is one of the most outstanding of its kind due to the richness and variety of canonical buildings built or reformed during the average and later centuries. The fact that regular life was established at the end of the 11th century (on the initiative of the reforming bishop Pedro de Roda) and lasted until the 19th century has meant that today we have preserved in a sufficiently representative state the spaces dedicated to residency program (dormitories, refectories), meeting (chapter rooms, consistory) and prayer (cathedral church, chapels), around one of the most outstanding cloisters of the Radiant Gothic style in Europe. The use of the plural to speak of the dependencies has its raison d'être in the fact that, throughout the more than nine centuries of use, the canons have been moving them within the built complex, in such a way that the same space has been used for more than one purpose. The end of the regular life and the convenience of incorporating new functions has meant that this complex trajectory is still alive, since in the 19th and 20th centuries adaptations were made to new destinations and even now, at the beginning of the 21st century, interventions are still being considered. 

The history must begin with the construction of the primitive canonry, later called cillería, in the last years of the 11th century. It was a building divided into two levels and with more than likely vertical separations, currently used as a goldsmith's shop for the Diocesan Museum, conference room . conference room The disappeared Romanesque cloister of the first half of the 12th century had its own chapterhouse and refectory, whose materiality we do not know. In the second half of the 12th century a large Romanesque episcopal palace was built, with an L-shaped floor plan, which had a large hall and a wing destined for residency program, as well as a portico and wooden gallery. In 1273 the Romanesque palace was donated by Bishop Armingot to the canons, which allowed the subsequent adaptation of the old great conference room to a dormitory and part of the private quarters to conference room chapter house (new chamber or of the belvederes, from the remodeling of the openings that have been discovered very recently). At that time, the canons also had an infirmary, the walls of which have recently been identified under the canons' sacristy. Around 1300 and during the first decades of the 14th century, the new Gothic cloister was built, with its new refectory, kitchen and annexes, and a monumental space initially intended for the chapterhouse conference room but which was finally used as a consistory (court of justice) and the burial place of Bishop Barbazán (hence its current name of Barbazana chapel). The humidity of the dormitory determined its transformation at the beginning of the 15th century by Don Lancelot, vicar of the diocese, who commissioned the construction of transverse stone arches designed to support the slab of a new dormitory, which is why it is usually called a "high dormitory". In times it had wooden cells that facilitated the intimacy of the canons. In the 16th century there were important changes of use in the spaces already built, which affected the chapter house conference room and the refectory, and the space located to the east of the dormitory (later called conference room de Cortes because it housed those of Navarre) was modified. But from the architectural point of view, the modifications of the 18th century were more important: new conference room chapter and new Library Services with its eastern loggias, whose substructure invaded the Gothic towered building annexed to the refectory. The transformations of use in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the fitting out of new chapels (Gothic refectory, Barbazana), the frustrated construction of a new chapter house conference room and the fitting out of spaces for the Diocesan Museum - among other changes that cannot be detailed in this summary- once again transformed the old medieval buildings, whose historical relevance should be enhanced in the interventions that are currently being contemplated.
 

Overall view from the cathedral façade tower

Tall bedroom in its present state