BARCELONA: ARCHITECTURE AND URBANIZATION

Photograph by Isabel Pérez Lago

Many artistic events have influenced the transformation and general perception of Barcelona. Among them are the Universal Exposition (1888), the International Exposition of 1929, the appearance of a school of rationalist architecture & surrealist painters (1939), and the Olympic Games (1992). Barcelona is mainly understood as a dynamic space regenerated and redefined in terms of cultural identity. By the end of the XIX Century, architecture became associated with the concept of Modernisme, “a broad cultural movement that emerged in Catalonia” (Robinson et al. 9). Artists organized meetings, exhibitions, poetry readings and performances at places like Barcelona’s Four Cats Café. Living in Barcelona between the two exhibitions mentioned above, Antonio Gaudi, one of the major exponents of the “fin-de-siècle architecture,” constructed churches, parks and schools. He also restored cathedrals and designed water pipes. Gaudi’s style was recognized for a harmonic integration of architectural elements, functionality, simplicity, organic abstraction, and the use of ceramic tilework (trencadis). In the 1950s, Catalan architects also tried to respond to urban growth with new spatial logics. There existed the idea of producing another exhibit in 1982, which was never carried out.

The Barcelona Forum was framed as an “urbanization project.” By combining economic and urban interests, the Forum supported the idea of using public events for “large-scale urban development schemes” that, in general, did not correspond with the needs of the people living in disfavored parts of the city. The “Barcelona Model” used urban renovation to control social coherence whereas the city developed into a “tourist icon offering accessible culture,” as urban planner Stan Majoor affirms (181). The new Barcelonese aesthetics distracted the visitors from questions like employment or housing. The Olympics motivated the regeneration of neighborhoods such as Poblenou and the so-called “red light district,” El Raval, where the construction of MACBA (Museu D’Art Contemporani De Barcelona) replaced part of the “working-class housing.” MACBA provided El Raval’s population with the opportunity to mix among the newcomers and enhance social life, inducing the most “socially vulnerable people” to leave the area. MACBA embarked on a long series of debates, workshops, exhibitions and other reconciliatory actions in a new political/artistic relationality with the community called “museu molecular” while children from the neighborhood would flagrantly skate on the ramps outside of the building, displaying an alternative and contagious sense of sociability.

References

Majoor, Stan. Disconnected Innovations: New Urbanity in Large-Scale Development Projects: Zuidas Amsterdam, Ørestad Copenhagen, and Forum Barcelona. Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2008.

Robinson, William H., Jordi Falgàs and Carmen Belén Lord. Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.