Share
home · museum · mev · the building

The building

In 1995, with the signing of the agreement for institutional collaboration between the Bishopric of Vic, Vic Town Council and the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), it was decided to begin a new period for the museum, which has led to the construction of a new building to be used exclusively as a museum, located next to the cathedral’s large Romanesque bell tower, exactly on the same site where the former school of Sant Josep once stood.


According to this new agreement, the Department of Culture undertook to underwrite the financial costs of the new museum and chose the architects Federico Correa and Alfonso Milà. In agreement with the new board of the Episcopal Museum, bearing in mind the museographic requirements established in the museological programme, and after analysing the study of the state of repair of the old School of Sant Josep, the architects proposed the demolition of the old building and the construction of a brand new museum.

The General Directorate of Cultural Heritage has been in charge of carrying out the project, which has been directed by the Department of Culture’s Major Infrastructures Programme with regard to the construction of the building, and the Generalitat’s Museums Department, as regards the museographic project.
The museological project has been based essentially on the same criteria of arrangement of the museum’s art collections as those historically established by Mossèn Gudiol and Mossèn Junyent, but they have been adapted to more modern technical requirements of conservation and exhibition. The fact of having chosen the traditional criterion of exhibiting the collections separately according to the materials – lapidary, painting, sculpture, textiles and clothing, glass, leather, metalwork, precious metals, forge work and ceramics – has allowed the architects to place these collections in the most suitable parts of the new building, giving priority to the temperature and conservation needs and the most suitable lighting, which is mainly artificial all over the Museum, except for the glass and ceramics collections.
The museographic order we have established for the exhibition of the works in each collection is chronological and stylistic. The aim, essentially educational, is for the visitor to be able to easily follow the evolution of the history of the different arts represented. Following the most modern museographic criteria, one area of the building has been set aside for study galleries, namely, storerooms open to the public, which can be visited, and this has enabled us to make a freer selection of the best works in each collection, which are shown in the permanent exhibition rooms, while the rest are exhibited in these study galleries placed at the end of the visit.