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Fusion of style and personality

Timoteo Briet

Timoteo Briet Montaud (1859-1925)

Son and grandson of master masons, Briet was born in Cocentaina and moved with his family to Alcoy around 1871, and soon he enrolled in the Elementary Industrial School. Since then, he has shown a great vocation for drawing. At the end of these studies, he enrolled in the army and at age 21 he moved to Barcelona where he studied Bachelor, Fine Arts and finally Architecture. He has as teachers Elias Rogent and Luis Domenech i Montaner, and as a promotion partner to another citizen of Alcoy, Vicente Pascual Pastor.

He returned to Alcoy with the title in 1890

Sober and dignified in some works, cheerful and colorful in others, Briet always displays his aesthetic talent and his sense of composition.

The aesthetic tendency that Timoteo Briet mostly adopts within modernism is the Viennese Secession. This artistic movement initiated in 1897 by a group of 19 Viennese artists, led among others by Gustav Klimt, reinterpreted the modernist style. These Viennese artists reinterpreted the exuberance of the organic and floral representation, they did not completely eliminate the reference to nature, but they reduced it considerably, introducing abstract schematization, representative austerity and geometric symbology.

The square, the circle, the rectangle and the pendants appear as an identity stamp, both on the facades and in the interiors. We can mention among the works of Briet that follow the canons of the Secession the following: The facade of the Circulo Industrial, his own house on  San José 24, building at Pintor Casanova 18, the Hydroelectric Substation and the Municipal Slaughterhouse, among others.

Timoteo Briet is also the author of the Casa Laporta project, the first modernist work in Alcoy. In it Briet adopts, exceptionally, Art Nouveau. However, it is an Art Nouveau, content, not overloaded; where the simplicity of the curved lines is mixed with the ornamentation of non-exuberant vegetal inspiration.

Among his most outstanding works are:

Iglesia de las Hermanas de los Pobres

Fábrica de Rodes

Convento e iglesia de las Siervas de María de la calle Cordeta 1

Casa Laporta en País Valenciá 26

Part of El Círculo Industrial (the library in 1906, the facade in 1909 and salón in 1910)

La Subestación Hidroeléctrica, Calle Colón 1

El antiguo Matadero, Avenida Juan Gil Albert 6

La iglesia de San Jorge, Calle Santo Tomás 10

Buildings at calle S. Nicolás numbers 25, 32, 35 y 41

Calle Pintor Casanova 18, 20 y 22

Calle S. José 24 y 26

Calle Cura Belloch 9

"Timoteo Briet dies in 1925. His niche in the cemetery is shameful, his name is hidden from the sight of all that pass by and nobody gives him a handful of flowers. His bad star has haunted him after death. I think we are still in time to remedy it. From here I ask whoever has competences, to rescue from oblivion this famous architect to whom we owe so many beautiful buildings”

Excerpt from the work of Jacqueline Charon Bignolas (2009) "Alcoy contado por sus piedras y vida de Vicente Pascual”