The franchise model has reached museums, and with energy, at least for the Carmen Thyssen Collection, whose homes in Madrid, Barcelona, and Málaga will soon be joined by a fourth one in Girona, thanks to a competition where the Madrid firm Nieto Sobejano – with Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano at the helm – has triumphed.

The 4,000-square-meter museum will showcase 19th- and 20th-century Catalan painting in a monastery of the city, which will be duly restored and enlarged for the purpose. Aside from ensuring that the artworks are properly displayed, the project will establish a rapport between the architecture and the surrounding landscape through a garden over the collection. A garden which will reinterpret the cloistral layout that is typically found in convents, but which this particular monastery never came to have.