It’s hard to imagine another spot on earth where an architect would be besieged as if he were Julio Iglesias. But Barcelonans love architecture, and in Spain’s post-Franco cultural boom, the city has emerged as the most design-minded place in Europe. “This is a passionate moment for people in Catalonia,” says Oriol Bohigas, the most influential architect in the city. To get ready for the ‘92 Games, the town went after some of the biggest international architects, and also commissioned dozens of inventive Catalan designers. The mania for high design extends to a taste for outrageously theatrical interiors, especially in the trendy bars and clubs where young designers cut their teeth.
“In America, we give in to other pressures at the expense of design,” says Frank Gehry, the maverick California architect who’s creating a gigantic, surreal golden fish that will hover 90 feet above the beach in Barcelona, smack in the middle of a retail complex he’s building. “In Barcelona, they’re unusually designconscious.” And they don’t mind taking chances. Looming over the site of Gehry’s outsize goldfish are two new skyscrapers; the better one is a tall cage of crisscrossed white trusses by Bruce Graham of Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. It’s strange to stick two towers on a beach, and stranger still in acity with virtually no other high-rises. Then there’s the sleek, white, ultramodern museum by Richard Meier of New York going up in the old Gothic quarter; it’s arresting to come upon it squeezed into the rabbit warren of narrow streets and ancient crumbling buildings, like an ocean liner run aground.
If a city could have a psychological profile, Barcelona would be manic-depressive. Its history is marked by bursts of artistic exuberance, then spells of cultural blues. Sitting on the edge of the Mediterranean, ringed on three sides by mountains, the town didn’t outgrow its medieval walls until industry arrived in the 19th century. A grid of streets was laid out beyond the old port, with big plazas at the intersections, so the city took on an orderly grandeur (unlike the urban chaos of Madrid).
The newly prosperous bourgeois Barcelonans had an eye for the avant-garde. They commissioned the fabulously mannered modernista Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) and his ingenious contemporaries to design sumptuous houses and apartments: fantastic places with pillars carved like tree trunks, curving balconies, crusts of wildly sculpted trim, vivid bits of colored tile. Catalan design was eclectic-and a bit madand the architects were obsessed with crafts and materials. The 1929 Exposition prompted another flurry of building, from the Disney-ish Spanish Village and grandiose stadium on Montjuic (wonderfully rebuilt for the ‘92 Games) to cool modernist buildings designed by such Catalans as Josep Lluis Sert.
The Olympics have given Barcelona a new excuse to revitalize. But the city’s spirited approach to contemporary design dates back to the late ’70s, as Spain was waking up from its 40-year cultural nap under Fascism. When the first democratically elected mayor, Narcis Serra (now Vice President of Spain), looked at Barcelona, with its ugly industrial sprawl and cheap housing on the outskirts, “I had the idea we had to darn the town like a sock.” He asked Bohigas to take over city planning; the first thing the visionary architect did was shelve the master plan. “A big plan is utopian,” he says. “It is not democratic. When the moment comes to do something, the plan is too old.” He started with small projects (the town was broke, so it was just as well), targeting areas in the densely populated city of 1.7 million where there was no sense of neighborhood, no green space, no Spanish plaza for people to gather. “It was important to create images that define the city,” says Ignasi de Lecea, a city design official. “The bus stops were the only identification.” Bohigas commissi private local architects to create an astonishing array of public spaces.
Polities and good architecture are strange bedfellows, but in Barcelona the marriage has worked. When Mayor Pasqual Maragall ran for re-election last spring, architecture was a campaign issue. “It was in the papers every day,” says Albert Ferre, a magazine editor. Under Maragall, the plaza program has boomed. Now there are more than 100 new public spaces-the most ambitious civic program of its kind in the world. This year the program won the Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University.
Barcelona is small enough so that the architects and politicians all seem to know each other. It’s very Mediterranean: “Many things are decided over dinner,” says David Mackay, a British-born partner in Bohigas’s firm. Such innovative Catalan designers as Santiago Calatrava, Beth Gali, Jaume Bach and Gabriel Mora have done city projects. “We can make architecture without falling into bureaucracy,” says architect Lluis Domenech. From a tiny, fan-shaped plaza in an ancient courtyard in the Gothic quarter to a serene expanse of pool, palms and playground carved out of an old quarry on the city’s edge, the plazas exemplify Catalan eclecticism and a passion for materials, especially stone and metalwork. They’re a magnet for families, kids on bikes, old people walking dogs. International artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra and Beverly Pepper, the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida and the Catalan Xavier Corbero are among those who have made pieces for the plazas (famous or not, every artist is paid the same$20,000 plus materials). “It’s not really a rich city, " says architect Elias Torres, who’s restoring Gaudi’s fantastic Parc Guell. “But the money is used in a good way.”
Once Barcelona was chosen for the ‘92 Olympics, the pesetas really began to pour in: $5 billion in public funds (half from Madrid) and much more from private developers. So the town began to do more than mend the sock. Along the once grimy industrial waterfront, train tracks were moved inland and four kilometers of beach reclaimed. This splendid new stretch of palmlined esplanade is the stage for huge Olympic-inspired projects: besides the Graham skyscraper (home to a luxury hotel and apartments) and Gehry’s fish, the Villa Olimpica is a development that will house 15,000 Olympic athletes and escorts before the apartments are turned over to private owners. Not everyone is thrilled: many mourn the demolition of Barceloneta, a grungy warehouse district famous for its great seafood shacks on the beach. And many of the blocky new brick apartment buildings, designed by various prize-winning local architects, are disappointing; so many restrictions were put on the designs that the lively Catalan eclecticism is mostly missing.
More adventurous are some local architects’ designs for Olympic facilities. In the north hills of Barcelona, one of four city sites for the Games, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos have designed a renegade archery range, a wonderfully outrageous series of deconstructivist pits with concrete roofs tilting in wildly different directions.
Barcelona clearly isn’t afraid of its vanguard. “It’s a very open city,” says Mackay. “They’re proud of this unusual, anarchic approach.” There’s plenty of room for architects like Albert Viaplana and Helio Pinion, who converted an 18thcentury convent on the Ramblas near the port into an art center: the new entrance ramp is so skewed it looks like the deck of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. And no one seems to mind the controversy kicked up by their chillingly minimalist Placa dels Paisos Catalans, now used mostly by skateboarders who love its expanse of pavement. “This time in Catalonia allows even us, so avant-garde, to build,” says Viaplana.
At the other end of the spectrum is the impish, ambitious Javier Mariscal, who has designed everything from restaurants to comic books, as well as the all-too-ubiquitous Cobi, a cartoon creature licensed as the official Olympic mascot which grins out from most of the billboards in town. One of Mariscal’s hottest creations is Torres de Avila, a nightclub in the hokey 1929 Spanish Village, designed with Alfredo Arribas in a style best described as baroque high tech. It’s meant for the kind of trendy Barcelona Yuppies who zip around on HarleyDavidsons wearing business suits and velvet equestrian crash helmets. A wild assemblage of wood, stone, copper, velvet, plastic and chiffon, the club’s interior also has sci-fi special effects that turn one cocktail lounge into a new-wave planetarium.
The fashionableness of such places is fleeting, but whether a project is ephemeral or monumental, minimalist or ornate, rational or nutty, the city seems to embrace almost any creative impulse and revel in the strange juxtapositions that result. Mariscal puts it this way: “Barcelona is a north city in a south country. There is happiness, light, good weather, parties. People know how to live. But people from the north also know how to organize.” It’s not enough to throw a party for great architecture. Barcelona knows how to get all the right people to show up.
