CaixaForum Barcelona is an exhibition centre inside a brick textile mill that looks like a small walled town. Its shows run from ancient cultures to modern and contemporary art and twentieth-century photography, and they change through the year, hung in workrooms built for looms. The factory is the other half of the visit: crenellated brick towers, wrought ironwork and ceramic — modernisme applied to production rather than to a house on Passeig de Gràcia.
Stand back on the north side and count the towers, then look for the chimney. There isn't one. Josep Puig i Cadafalch finished the mill in 1911 for an owner who had decided to run his machines on electricity rather than steam, so there was no boiler house and nothing to vent. It did not last. The company went bankrupt about seven years later, in the aftermath of the general strike of 1919. Arata Isozaki finished turning it into an arts centre in 2002. For most of the century in between the police had it: from 1940 the national police kept their horses in these yards and used the weaving sheds as a garage.