20 March 2013

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

STATELY AND PALATIAL ARCHITECTURE OF PAMPLONA

Art at the service of institutional power: the Palace of the Provincial Council of Navarre

D. Iñaki Urricelqui Pacho.
Chair of Navarrese Heritage and Art

In the new institutional framework emerged in the nineteenth century in Spain as a result of the Constitution of Cadiz (1812), the provincial councils, conceived as administrative and political territorial body, gained special relevance. It soon became necessary to emphasize their relevance through the construction of imposing palatial buildings that translated into stone the importance of such institutions, which thus became one of the main artistic promoters of the century. The Palace of the congress of the Deputies of Madrid (1843-1850) would mark a turning point in this subject of constructions, which had their parallels throughout the Spanish geography.

In Navarre, this reform took place especially after 1841 with the enactment of the Ley Paccionada. The provincial deputation had a precedent here in the Diputación del Reino, linked to the Cortes de Navarra. As happened in the rest of the Spanish provinces, it was soon necessary to provide the highest provincial institution with a fixed seat, thus overcoming a long period of itinerancy through different buildings in the city. The right moment came with the disentailment of Mendizábal (1836), when the convent of the Carmelite Carmelites, which had existed in Pamplona since the 17th century and which closed one of the fronts of the place del Castillo, was vacated. After arduous negotiations with the War Department and the City Council, the Provincial Council received the royal licence , and work began in 1840 at position by the Bilbao architect José de Nagusia. Construction was completed in 1851, and the first session was held in the new building on December 4.

Main floor plan of the Palacio de la Diputación before the extension in the 1930s
 

Aesthetically, the Palacio de la Diputación responds to the late-classicist tendency of the Elizabethan period, and, in the opinion of Pedro Navascués "its proportion, material nobility of the construction and expressive gravity make it a worthy end to Spanish neoclassicism". The set wins for its architectural rotundity, of sober classical Structures , thus revealing the institutional relevance of the building, while solving aesthetic problems to reconcile its factory with the annexed Teatro Principal, with design by Pedro Manuel Ugartemendía and works management of Nagusia himself, in one of the limits of the place del Castillo.

At the end of the XIX century the building destined to file of Navarre would be added to the set, with project of Florencio Ansoleaga, within the taste of the finisecular eclecticism. A new extension, already in the 1930s, would allow the institutional headquarters to be adapted to the new urban framework of the second expansion, conceived by Serapio Esparza in 1919. The work, which was awarded after a public tender, fell to the Yárnoz brothers and took the form of the extension of the building on the block framed by Avenida Carlos III and Cortes de Navarra Street.

The entire stone program of the palace is complemented by decorative, sculptural and pictorial sets, with historical and allegorical themes, which are located in interior spaces (Throne Room and Session Room), with paintings by foreign and local artists, and on the facades of the buildings (file de Navarra, facade facing Avenida Carlos III and facade facing Paseo Sarasate), where the works of Fructuoso Orduna stand out.
 

Original aspect of the main facade of the Palacio de la Diputacion at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.