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editorial
PUBLIC SPACE AND UNIVERSALITY

Nobody can deny that for Barcelona the years of the last turn of the century have been the most propitious in all its history as regards the city's international prestige and reputation. It seems that the impetus in this direction that was built up in the nineties gained momentum on entering the 21st century, but has still not reached its maximum point of intensity and acceleration. On the one hand, indeed, the indicators concerning the tourist industry confirm the fact that Barcelona is a pole of attraction for people from all over the planet, increasingly open to new markets, while at the same time hotels are catering for growing demand from professional and business sectors, something completely unthinkable fifteen years ago.
In the lead-up to the Universal Forum of Cultures, everything points to the fact that this extremely widespread phenomenon of suggestion will expand even further afield and, above all, become more solid and firmly based. Last summer, in its Sunday magazine of 10 August, The New York Times devoted one of its features to the most significant changes Barcelona has undergone and contrasted the cultural vitality of the Catalan capital to the sleepiness of Paris, mirroring, in the words of the correspondent, a "stagnant and self-satisfied" France. Although, since the invasion of Iraq, the Americans and the French have shown their claws to each other whenever they have had the chance, the article in this prestigious newspaper dealt with so many aspects of our situation that it would be ridiculous to see in the comparisons between Barcelona and Paris just another episode in a kind of "American revenge" based on political motives.
Nevertheless, over the past few years, Barcelona has never been out of the sights of the international media and observatories of all kinds. Also from New York, the Project for Public Spaces initiative has recently sprung up and this association of prestigious architects has not hesitated to choose Barcelona to launch a series of in-depth analyses of public spaces in various cities across the world. The series will continue with Paris, London and New York. The results of these studies are available on the organisation's website -www.pps.org- and in them they do not hold back from presenting well-argued criticisms alongside unequivocally positive judgements and praise. What is important to stress here, however, is not so much the resoundingly favourable conclusion Project for Public Spaces reached in its report on Barcelona, as the fact that our city was chosen to lead off a piece of systematic research on "quality public spaces" that have arisen from urban development all over the world. This is, quite simply, proof that Barcelona has become a paradigm to which attention must be paid when it comes to the changes and improvements being applied to the urban habitat.
As has already been said, this singularity, which affects us very directly as citizens, is likely to endure and even grow stronger over the next few years. On the one hand, the Forum 2004, although it is not its express intention, will act as a powerful amplifier. On the other, the current dynamic of urban development and the ambitious programme of architectural projects that has been set in train will ensure the spread of Barcelona's international reputation in virtue of the stature of the professionals who, in a relatively short period of time, have coincided in making outstanding contributions to the appearance and identification of public spaces.
Indeed, right now the city is living through what the mayor, Joan Clos, calls "a new architectural cycle", all the elements of which will very soon be seen. As a city that imports the best creations of contemporary architecture, Barcelona is in the middle of an unprecedented experience which this issue of B.MM is dedicated to describing in detail. In the Quadern Central readers will find a well-documented article by Albert Ferré in which the projects carried out by eminent foreign architects in Barcelona since the late 19th century are examined from a historical perspective and in relation to their context. This was intended as the essential gateway leading to a detailed presentation of the work that a number of professionals, identified with the most accomplished and most creative architecture being practised in the world today, are currently carrying out in our old and new public spaces. From Jean Nouvel to David Chipperfield, from Zaha Hadid to Dominique Perrault, from Richard Rogers to Herzog & De Meuron, from Arata Isozaki to Frank Gehry. The dossier reviews the creations by major international architects which, alongside the increasingly valued autochthonous tradition, will leave a new imprint of imagination, beauty and boldness on Barcelona.



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THE OBSERVATORY
This year... not either?
by Xavier Güell i Ferrer
editor of "Barcelona Economia"

The tragedy of September 11th, 2001, has hastened the already initiated ending of a notably long period of expansion of the world's principal economies. During 2002, a year that will go down in history for the war in Afghanistan and the increasingly strong feelings of insecurity brought forth by terrorist attacks all over the world, the economic crisis became generalized and grew even worse than before. This year, after an initial period marked by the war in Iraq, European economy continues to prove incapable of reacting in any positive way. The recent reduction in the price of money down to historic minima confirms that economic recession must be regarded as a real threat to our closest environment. (…)

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A new emerging society.
by Jordi Sanchez
director of the Jaume Bofill Foundation and lecturer in Political Science at the University of Barcelona

As a result of the social events that have taken place during the last months, the name of Barcelona is now linked to the fight for peace and against war. At the very least, two characteristics of the recent mobilizations can be underlined as exceptional. The first one is the intensity of those events, including the "cassolades" (thousands of citizens pounding on saucepans on their balconies or in the streets). Never before had Barcelona witnessed mobilizations with the capacity for marshalling support among such a numerous and variegated part of the population during such a long period of time. The second characteristic is the simultaneousness of those civic protests with others of a similar kind which were taking place all over the world. Those were the first global mobilizations, active throughout the planet to such an extent that, on February 15th, no continent failed to give voice to its opposition to war and its support to peace and a new political order.
In that context of global protest, the mobilizations achieved in Barcelona were an immense success; such an immense success, in fact, that, in the eyes of many people, Barcelona became one of the worldwide symbols of the fight against war and for peace. We only have to remember the words uttered by former president of the United States George Bush, the current president's father, who declared that the foreign policy of the United States of America could not be dictated from the streets of Barcelona. (…)
We've been witnessing different though constant armed conflicts in one form or another throughout the last decades. (…) Then why are these mobilizations happening now and why didn't they happen before? We'll never know the exact answer to this question because social phenomena are particularly complex and stem from very different and often far from obvious causes.
We may venture the hypothesis that those mobilizations have also had much to do with all the social, economic and political changes which are taking place all over the world, more particularly with the crisis that is generically affecting all political systems. (…)

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Leisure activities un Barcelona.
by Gabriel Pernau

The generations born in the nineteen sixties and seventies were brought up to believe that, once grown up, they would live in a kind of idyllic society in which people would work only a few hours a day because machines would free mankind of heavy work and of many obligations of daily life. They were promised that they would have a lot of free time at their disposal. It would be possible to hit on a magic formula that would allow a mathematically precise share-out of the 24 hours of a working day: eight hours devoted to rest, eight hours to work and eight hours to leisure.
Now that future has come. More than forty years have elapsed since Dumazedier wrote "Vers une civilisation du loisir" ("Towards a leisure society"), a book that made thousands of citizens in the developed world dream of a more idle life; however, the so-called leisure society continues to be a chimera people still long for but which appears to be more and more remote from reality.
(…) "The promise of a leisure society has been the great enticing carrot the world has been running after during the last decades of the twentieth century - states sociologist Salvador Cardús -. They made us believe that the future would be a better world, that we would work for only four or five hours a day and would enjoy many free hours, so that it was convenient to start educating young people according to that prospect; and, now, the situation is that people have learned macramé in civic centres but the last thing they're doing in their spare time is macramé".
There are different factors that explain why the promised leisure society is still far off or why only forty per cent of Barcelona's residents practise leisure activities weekly, a percentage which is far below the European average. Citizens cannot enjoy leisure if they do not have any free time, and we can only have free time if we are free of the burden of work and other daily obligations. Sociologist Marta Masats, from the Catalan Statistical Office, proposes, as a hypothesis, that the "deregulation" of the labour market, from the early nineteen eighties on, has brought about an increase in job precariousness as well as higher rates of work and longer working hours than in the nineteen sixties and seventies. "More particularly so in our country". If this hypothesis were to be proven correct, we could conclude that our obligations have increased to the same extent as the amount of spare time we used to have to enjoy ourselves has decreased.
Anyway, all experts do not agree with the assertion that we have less free time nowadays. Another sociologist, Salvador Giner, believes that such a statement is "a big lie". "We do have more spare time now!" - he assures fiercely, pounding on the table - "People who spend an average of three hours a day watching television have time to spare!. Football stadiums are regularly filled to capacity, there are endless queues of cars on the roads at week-ends and, on weekdays, people waste an average 20 minutes of their time going to work… But, of course, when asked, they all say they don't have time. Why is it so? Because people take up as many activities as they can. The point is to accumulate things to do in their diary; the in thing is to fill up all the pages. You don't have time to visit your auntie but, every week-end, you go skiing or to a sea resort? ".
(…) Salvador Cardús goes even further. He remarks that "free time is not a wish, it is in fact an imposition. They all try to have less free time, no matter how loud the say the opposite. Elderly citizens feel disheartened when they are forced to retire, and there are people who even make their working days longer so as to escape from a rather unsatisfactory free time. All things considered, we get bored easily, and we do many strange things to disguise that boredom, such as switching on the television and watching the kind of trashy programmes that would infuriate us if we were forced to watch them. But, which are the alternatives? To start talking to each other and end up arguing? To open a book when we don't even like reading? Watching television is a refuge, not a willed activity".
Marta Massats reveals that, in Catalonia as well as in the whole of Spain, there is a serious shortage of professionals specializing in making specific studies of leisure with the aim of ascertaining what the citizens do in their spare time. Up until now, the issue has almost always been addressed in a transversal way, either taking into consideration only certain segments of the population such as youth, elderly people, women or the disabled, or focusing on thematic spheres of activity such as culture or sport. One of the few existing surveys is the "Enquesta Metropolitana", directed by Giner and on which she collaborated with the chapter on leisure activities. To Massats, such a shortage is surprising. Surprising not only because leisure is the lifeblood of a most important economic sector, but also because leisure accounts for a very significant part of people's life, more precisely the part which allows the individual the greatest freedom of self-expression"
"We know very little about what the inhabitants of Barcelona do in their spare time", acknowledges Massats, who remarks that the extinct Soviet Union was the only society in human history that planned and organized its citizens' leisure time. In any event, the sociologist is confident that many of the current gaps in our knowledge of how Catalans amuse themselves or spend their time when they are not working will soon be filled thanks to the survey for which preparations are being made and which should provide detailed information about their leisure activities.
(…) The "Enquesta de Qualitat de la Cuitat" ("City Quality Survey), carried out in the autumn of 2002 and based on 2000 home enquiries, reveals that the three most common ways in which the inhabitants of Barcelona occupy their free time are, in order of frequency, taking walks, reading and watching television.
(…) Cardús believes that "leisure society is masking the reality we live in, which is a consumer society. Originally, leisure was the negation of business, but it is not the case anymore. Nowadays, leisure is business. And leisure time is a time subject to coercion, a very organized kind of coercion, but coercion after all, which shows how the individual is placed with regard to freedom. And we have to face the fact that we do not like to be free. It is during our spare time that we display the most gregarious patterns of behaviour. We all go to the same places. As we don't know what to do at weekends, instead of making our own decisions, we look at what others do and readily join in the game; we rush to shopping centres or village fairs, even though we know beforehand that we'll have to push our way through the crowd, eat rather unpalatable food and be overcharged for it and everything else… Very few people spend their spare time outside the frame of socially proposed patterns of behaviour, which are usually patterns of consumption, even in the case of local festivities which have now become travesties of popular celebrations organized by the town councils with the intention of encouraging consumption".
(…) What will happen in the future? Will mechanization enable us to have more time for ourselves? Will the five-hour working day be instituted all over Europe? Or will retirement age be extended, following the trend some countries have already started to set, with a view to guaranteeing our pensions? The experts have no real answers to these questions. Cardús is convinced that "the twenty-first century has begun in an atmosphere of tremendous confusion and unrest. There is no limit to work anymore if we want the stores to stay open twenty-four hours a day. Many things converge to make our life more difficult. There has been some kind of festive gathering in your home town and people ask you: did you go? And if your answer is no, that in fact you stayed at home, they look at you in surprise and tell you; Gee, you don't know what you've missed!, and you suddenly feel like a fool. God forbid that you should choose to stay at home having a siesta! We are surrounded by an all-pervading commercial compulsion. Personal interaction with friends and family is relegated lower and lower on the priority list, and this generates a deep feeling of malaise, more particularly so in a society like ours. Our resistance is being stretched to its limits and some people are beginning to explode. However, it is very difficult to escape from the influence of such authoritarianism. There is little room left for diversity. So, real leisure does not exist". (…)

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A Date with the World's Best Architecture




Up until the end of the 20th century, the gradual shaping of Barcelona into a great metropolis was essentially based on the efforts and ideas of its own civil society, its public authorities and its architects and town planners. During this process, recourse was occasionally had to projects and contributions from outside, while local professionals echoed the trends in international architecture and town planning.
The process of urban renewal which began in the 1980s and 90s, however, has as its distinguishing mark the presence of some of the big names of world architecture alongside professionals trained and consolidated in this country. This phenomenon is being repeated today in major projects such as the Forum 2004, the district of El Poblenou, the new Diagonal and the enlargement of Barcelona's fairground, La Fira.
This Quadern Central starts off with a historical article that looks at the international contribution to the development of Barcelona, before going on to provide a survey of the international projects in progress, supplemented by documentation on the careers of the architects involved, all of them leading figures in their profession today.




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The City that Comes from Abroad:
External contributions to the construction of Barcelona.
by Albert Ferré

(...) The town planning and architecture that have guided the city's development have, up until now, been the result of the needs and ambitions of the bourgeoisie that has dominated its economic life and the proposals of a group of professionals with a strictly local education, training and field of operations and close ties to this bourgeoisie and the local government. The refurbishment of the historical centre between 1830 and 1860, the building of the Eixample and the peripheral neighbourhoods in the period spanning the final decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th, the construction of the housing estates and suburbs during the central years of the Franco regime, and the development of the new areas of centrality driven by the staging of the Olympic Games, were all projects promoted by the bourgeoisie of the city and conceived by architects educated and trained there.
This article describes how, in this ambitious but isolated, economically powerful but culturally endogamous context, occasional recourse to plans and projects from abroad has made it possible to go beyond or regenerate local models and, in consequence, give new stimuli to the city's development (...)

I. The metropolitan city
The Eixample
With the building of the Eixample, Barcelona took the most ambitious step forward in its history as far as the conception of its size and structure are concerned and went from being a practically medieval city to becoming a benchmark for contemporary town planning. This change was the result of the Spanish government's imposing the development plan drawn up by Ildefons Cerdà, a specialist employed by the state, external to the local government and, indeed, conflicting with other projects and conceptions directly backed by the City Council.
(...) In contrast to the attitude of local society and local power interests, content to go on in the same old way, Cerdà's ideological and scientific vision laid the foundation for a new model of urban development that was to become, as in the case of the major American cities, the motor driving the city's economic growth. (...) The Cerdà Plan transformed the city into an open, non-hierarchical system, an isotropic, flexible structure stretching across the coastal plain, thereby facilitating the co-ordinated, democratic growth of the city, defining an efficient system of roads and transport infrastructures adapted to the new railway, and ensuring exceptionally healthy sanitation and living conditions.

The Jaussely Plan
(...) This planning instrument was brought into question around the turn of the century. (...) In 1903 the City Council held a competition for plans to solve the problem of the fit, or link, between the Eixample project and the surrounding villages that had been attached to the city. The jury included Josep Puig i Cadafalch himself and Francesc Cambó. With such people on it, in making its choice, the jury looked well beyond the particular planning issue that was the object of the competition and sought a more comprehensive response to the new social and political needs of the time. No wonder, then, that the successful entry consisted of a project devised on the other side of the Pyrenees. The proposal, presented by Léon Jaussely, concretely and ambitiously sketched out the representatively and functionally specialised new organisation of the city by defining a polycentric structure upon the homogeneous layout of the Eixample and by inter-relating infrastructures, roads, buildings and monuments in a complex and extremely hierarchical new organisation. (...)

The city beyond Collserola
(...) In the first decade of the last century, the advent of the first tram routes led to several attempts in Barcelona to build, on the hills and slopes of Collserola, what are known, mainly in the English-speaking world, as garden cities. (...) Just a few years later, the North American engineer and businessman Frank S. Pearson, in another private-sector initiative, took up the project of extending the city's residential growth towards Collserola, but with a far more comprehensive vision of its regional development and the railway infrastructures required for its industrial development. (...) The Barcelona of Pearson's plans was based on an elementary zoning scheme covering an extremely large region. Services and trade were to be located in Ciutat Vella and the Eixample, the residential areas on the two slopes of Collserola and industry on the Vallès plain, far removed from the city centre. To make this possible (...) work began on building a European-gauge railway linking Plaça de Catalunya and the main urban centres in El Vallès with the intention of continuing northwards towards the French border and, from there, onto Paris.
Although this metropolitan railway line is practically the only thing Pearson's vision has left us with, it laid the basis for a new functional specialisation project for the city that would eventually have more far-reaching effects on its expansion and structure as it spread to the other side of Collserola to also occupy the Vallès. (...)

II. The modern city
The presentation of the project by Rubió i Tudurí for the Future Barcelona, which advocated extending the city towards Hospitalet and the neighbouring municipalities along the left bank of the river Llobregat and intended to turn Collserola into the big central park of a new ring of growth in the nearer part of the Vallès (Sant Cugat - Cerdanyola), coincided with the Barcelona Universal Exhibition, which included the German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, and the beginnings of the formation of the group of local architects that was to introduce modern architecture into Catalonia. (...)
In this context of the internationalisation of professional practice, there were, paradoxically, virtually no foreign architects living or working in Catalonia. During the period of the Republican government of the Generalitat de Catalunya, this was due to the government's short duration and the fact that there existed a group of local architects, the GATCPAC, with an enormous productive capacity of its own. During the Franco dictatorship, it was a result of the cultural decline brought about by the country's international isolation and its poverty in relation to its European neighbours. (...)

Le Corbusier and the GATCPAC. The Macià Plan
The presence of the German Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition represented modern architecture's great debut in Barcelona. (...) It was perhaps the building most commented on by the press at the time and, above all, the most influential in the history of modern architecture, but Mies did not establish any links with the local government or the group of Catalan architects and, in the end, his work proved to be ephemeral, just like many others built for the Exhibition.
The GATCPAC (and the GATEPAC, the all-Spain organisation of which it became a member) was set up at the end of 1930 and, through the magazine A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea, started to publicise the main ideas of modern architecture as interpreted by Le Corbusier and the designs and works of the collective publishing the magazine. (...)
In March 1932 (...) Josep Lluís Sert and Le Corbusier reached an agreement with Francesc Macià to draw up a new town planning project for Barcelona (...). This project, known as the Macià Plan and eventually presented in 1934, developed the theoretical models of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret (...). What it did, in fact, was to update the Cerdà Plan so as to bring it into line with the needs of an industrial city (zoning, green spaces, a solution to the lack, or poor condition, of housing for workers), the new construction techniques (the use of steel and concrete) and the new technological advances in the fields of communications and transport (telephones, lifts, cars and aeroplanes). (...)
Post-war architecture
The first, and practically only, example of rationalist architecture built in Barcelona in the 1940s, and of which there remain just a few fragments, is the Olivetti factory designed by the Italian architect Italo Lauro and the municipal architect José Soteras. The Franco regime had wiped out everything that had gone before in regard to architecture and local town planning, just as it had in every other field of economic and cultural life in the country. With the members of the GATCPAC exiled or dead and the lines of communication with the international community of architects severed, the resurgence of professional practice occurred very slowly and cut off from previous local experiences.
The Architects' Association of Catalonia played a key part in this resurgence. It invited various European architects to present their recent work and began, through its magazine Cuadernos de Arquitectura, to spread information about this work and the architecture of the 1930s (...).
The country's economic growth led to a gradual intensification of international trade relations and the arrival of outside influences in architecture, especially through the dissemination of foreign magazines and books in the original languages or in translation. In this context, the gradual return of Antonio Bonet Castellana, a disciple of the GATCPAC and former collaborator of Le Corbusier who lived in Buenos Aires until 1963 (author, among other works, of Casa La Ricarda, 1953-1962; the Meridiana greyhound stadium, 1962-1963; and the Mediterráneo block of flats, 1960-1966) and of Josep Lluís Sert himself with the last works of his professional career around 1970 (...) (the group of dwellings known as Les Escales Park, 1967-1973; Fundació Miró, 1972-1975), made it possible, to some extent, to reintroduce the research in town planning carried out in Barcelona before the Civil War and since then in some of the main centres where modern architecture was being produced.

III. The event-city
The Olympic Games
(...) The City Council, now democratically elected, took full advantage of Barcelona's hosting of the Olympic Games to enhance the city's competitiveness in the new global system of urban centres. The Games were the main instrument in catalysing the support and huge investment the city needed to undertake the restructuring of many of its neighbourhoods, make good its shortages in transport infrastructures and cultural facilities, and turn Barcelona into a brand recognised the world over in order to boost its tourist industry. (...) During the eighties, Barcelona strengthened its commitment to contemporary architecture (which it had already proven since the constitution of the first democratic city council after Franco's death) and followed a similar trend to all the major cities in the West, endowing itself with significant buildings designed by architects of international repute. (...)
If we exclude J.C.N. Forestier's involvement in the construction of the park on Montjuïc prior to the 1929 Universal Exhibition, this was the first time that any tier of government had invited non-local architects to build in the city and not simply produce speculative proposals. And it did so in a really big way, giving public-sector commissions in just a five-year period to Santiago Calatrava (Bac de Roda bridge), Gae Aulenti (refurbishment of the MNAC), Vittorio Gregotti (collaboration in renovating the Olympic Stadium), Arata Isozaki (Sant Jordi sports pavilion), Norman Foster (Collserola telecommunications tower), Richard Meier (MACBA), Rafael Moneo (Municipal Auditorium) and Alvaro Siza (Meteorology and Costal Demarcation Service), as well as helping to secure private-sector commissions for SOM and Frank O. Gehry (Hotel Arts and the fish sculpture) and once again for Rafael Moneo (L'Illa building with Manuel de Solà-Morales). (...)
The International Forum of Cultures
In Barcelona, the drive to improve the quality of the urban fabric, to construct easily communicable symbolic buildings that will stimulate activity and attract private investment, is illustrated with increasing clarity by the leading role currently being played by the projects that are to regenerate the eastern part of the city beyond the Olympic Village and, at the other end of town, stimulate development in the area between Plaça Cerdà and the airport. Whereas, at the end of the day, the buildings designed by non-Catalan architects turned out to be a small minority of those erected for the Olympic Games (...) and most of the commissions came from the public sector, we are now faced with a profusion of works by major names of international architecture (...).
A forerunner of this type of commission, although still linked to the momentum generated by the Olympic Games, was the World Trade Center in Port Vell (...), by the North Americans Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Since then, having recourse to this type of big architecture studios is becoming so common that it is virtually impossible to keep track of all the instances. Perhaps Barcelona has become a leader in this. The following is a possible list of such projects already built, or soon to be built: the Diagonal Mar complex of high-rise apartment blocks and shopping centre (developed by the United States real estate company Hines, with the participation of Robert AM Stern Architects in the shopping mall), the hotel and conference hall along the Gran Via-airport axis, the conversion of Las Arenas bullring into a leisure activities centre and the development of the Viladecans business park (all by Richard Rogers Partnership in conjunction with the local Alonso i Balaguer studio); the Agbar headquarters in Glòries (Jean Nouvel with B720), the entrances to the CaixaForum cultural centre (Arata Isozaki), two new hotels in Diagonal-Poblenou (Dominique Perrault), an office complex in Zona Franca (Foreign Office Architects in collaboration with Arata Isozaki), one of the first groups of offices in the 22@ district, adjacent to the Agbar tower (David Chipperfield), and, commissioned by the public sector, the Judicial City in L'Hospitalet (David Chipperfield with local studio B720), the Forum of Cultures building (Herzog & de Meuron), a cinema complex in Meridiana-Glòries (Zaha Hadid), a new Museum of Mobility in La Sagrera (Frank O. Gehry) and the major enlargement of Fira de Barcelona in Polígon Pedrosa (Toyo Ito) (...).

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Jean Nouvel.

An open, active and welcoming city
"As a young architect, travelling to Barcelona represented for me what travelling to Italy meant for the architects of the 19th century: a pilgrimage to the city "designed" by Cerdà and inhabited by the guardian figure of Gaudí, an immersion in the sources of modernity. That is why it is a matter of pride to me that I have been called o [!]matter of pride to me that I have been called on to build in this city. I shall mention my great interest in three very different projects -the Agbar Tower, the park and the activities area in Zona Franca- just by way illustration, as I prefer to stress the attraction I feel for the rugged yet beautiful Catalan landscape, the marine light and the open, active and welcoming city in which I have acquired habits and made some very good friends. And on each of my visits my pleasure is renewed with cordial meetings and nocturnal meals. The rhythm of the city suits me perfectly (it's no secret that, by nature, I prefer to dine late). I am pleasantly struck by Barcelona's hospitality and I would like to express my gratitude here to a city that has welcomed me with such generosity". J. N.
The Agbar Tower. 1999-2003
This is not a tower, a skyscraper in the American sense of the word, but a unique outgrowing in the middle of a rather peaceful city. Neither is it a slim, wiry vertical like the needles and belfries that are generally dotted about horizontal cities, but rather a fluid mass that has broken through the ground, a geyser bursting up under permanent, yet measured, pressure.
The surface of the building evokes water. It is smooth, continuous, but also vibrant and transparent, since the matter is seen with a coloured and uncertain, luminous and nuanced depth. This architecture is born out of the earth, but it doesn't have the weight of stone. It could be a distant echo of the old formal Catalan obsessions blown in by the mysteries of the wind coming from Montserrat. The uncertainties of the matter and the light make the Agbar bell tower vibrate on the Barcelona skyline.
This singular object, a distant mirage both during the daytime and at night, a precise reference point for entry into the new Diagonal from Plaça de les Glòries, becomes the new symbol of the international metropolis and one of its best ambassadors.

New Diagonal. 2001
To talk of the Diagonal is to talk of transversality. The belonging to different sequences. To talk of the Diagonal is to talk of linearity. This linearity is conceived here as a link, as a place that has to be frequented, as it is a place of identity; a point of reference, of contrast; a place for pedestrians, cars, cyclists; a place for public transport, for the tram; a place for on-the-spot services, newsstands, bars, restaurants.
The new Diagonal cannot be like the old one. Other times, other customs, other attitudes. Other times, another approach to town planning. In the old Diagonal, the continuity is more firmly established, the structure that has been built there is more linear and the trees planted at regular intervals may be enough to mark the rhythm of the constructed line.
Here -we see this today- a central boulevard planted with trees is not enough. The identity is not constituted, the line drawn is uncertain.
This linearity must be strongly established. Of course, people must be encouraged to frequent this transversal space by programming, but also by the pleasure, the joy of visiting it and the singular expression of the public space of a city that is permanently reinventing itself.
We propose a land art, an urban art gesture. A ribbon of shadows, lights and colours. A ribbon of vegetation, generous, full of flowers, luxuriant but controlled, continuous but varied, identical due to its essence but different due to the geometric and thematic nature of the sequences. It is a wide ribbon that sometimes sways, sometimes takes off, sometimes gets coiled up. A ribbon that on occasions sinks into the ground and at others expands into stalactites. A ribbon that enriches itself with the rhythm of sequences of palm trees and plane trees: 50% of those that there are keep to random rhythms and the rest huddle together in tiny microclimates, reference points on the ribbon and the place for particular activities such as playing pétanque, bars, etc.

Parc del Poblenou. 2001
Shade, a consequence of the sun, is its friend, and is all the more appreciated the greater the contrast with the intensity of the rays biting into the passer by. It becomes a land of refuge, which predisposes families that lose themselves in the pétanque player's or chess player's maze to enjoy a stroll, the calm, reading, conspiratorial dialogues and the non-violent games of a child on a swing.
Poblenou Park is written with the vocabulary of shade, from filtered shade, dotted with seedbeds and glints of sun, to patches of black shade thrown out by the walls confirming the geometric pattern of their borders; from shade broken up into tiny bits in motion around the bare spots in the trees to the chequered shade under the plaited lianas; from the patches of shade glittering on the water to the deep, matt shade of a distant landscape, of an area of scrub.
Poblenou Park has been made like an architecture of stone with its vaults, its ceilings, its hypostyle rooms, its domes, its walls, its terraces, but the material is vibrant, green or multi-coloured, natural and controlled. An architecture calling for calm, silence.

City Metropolitana
Metropolitan Area. 2001-05
Between the airport and the city, after the area occupied by Fira de Barcelona, a new business and meeting district is being put up in the middle of what has come to be called an "activities area", arid and untidy at the moment, with the aim of constructing an urban sector that will create its own microclimate, its own oasis.
All the offices, the hotel and the conference centre are arranged round an umbrella, a luxuriant garden of shade and light.
The façades of all the offices look onto this gigantic inner courtyard of green.
In the conference centre, a Fullerian bubble of scales of multiple translucency, meeting places unfold that open onto terraces protected from the wind and the sun in synergy with the deck of the hotel roof, occupied by the restaurant, bar and swimming pool.
Another way of working and of living business meetings in the Barcelona climate.

Page 45
Arata Isozaki

Fascination for Barcelona
"Since 1960 I have come to Barcelona on several occasions. I remember especially the visit I made in 1983 to take part in a restricted invitation issued by Barcelona City Council to tender for the design of the Olympic Ring for the '92 Barcelona Olympic Games, which was my definitive encounter with the city. Since being given the honour of designing Palau Sant Jordi, I have come to your city on a more or less regular basis over the last ten years. I therefore think that the ties binding me to Barcelona are extremely close and important, both personally and professionally.
While I was working on the construction of Palau Sant Jordi, I had the chance of getting to know Catalonia, especially the Costa Brava, which has become a regular retreat, particularly in summer. It is somewhere you can think and relax in an outstanding setting, with nice people, good cooking and an excellent climate.
My relationship with Barcelona has been a long and intense one. It is certainly one of the cities with which I have had most contact and which I have frequented most in the world after Tokyo, so much so that of all the cities I have been to, it is the one that has most fascinated me.
Apart from the marvellous, indisputable work that Gaudí has left the city, it was very interesting for me to experience, day by day, the big transformations in planning and architectural style that have taken place in it recently; transformations that have always been carried out in a way that is respectful of the existing structure and context, which is where, in my opinion, the value of this city lies. The Gothic, the Renaissance, the Eixample, Modernism, Noucentisme, Rationalism-Functionalism, Olympism and Post-Olympism all co-exist and enrich the city through their interplay. In consequence, the city is criss-crossed and interwoven with the diversity of periods and styles through which it has lived.
One example of this is the recent intervention in a work that is small in size but of great historical significance for the city -the old Casaramona textile factory designed by Puig i Cadafalch- in order to create accesses to the new cultural centre. Without doubt, it is part of the great architectural heritage bequeathed to the city. Moreover, just opposite this building is one of the most important works in the birth of modern architecture, the German Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe. In this intervention, whose aim is to open up new accesses between these two beautiful examples of architecture, I have tried to create a work fostering harmonious living together, one of the values that the city of Barcelona has taught me.
Nowadays, throughout the world, a lack of planning criteria predominates, as town planning is under the domination of economic interests. Those glorious times we experienced in the eighties and nineties, with major investments by the public sector, have now passed by. In spite of this, that living together, that harmony in creating a more perfect urban fabric, still survives.
At the moment, together with Alejandro Zaera Polo, I am engaged on a major work in an area which the City Council wants to develop next to the new Fira de Barcelona extension. It is a 35,000 square metre site in Passeig de la Zona Franca on which a business centre occupying a total of 60,000 m2 is to be built.
The owners intend to carry out this macro-project in different stages. Taking this idea as our starting point, it occurred to us that we might draw up plans according to the requirements at any given time. Our proposal consists in making six virtual blocks in the form of cubes measuring 52.5 x 52.5 metres at the base. On the basis of these volumes, the area available for building on the site is gradually used up, so that, naturally, we achieve different dimensions and office modules with different characteristics. In other words, the volume is not formally predefined as usually happens in town planning; rather, the need for it to be used is formally recognised.
Also, of course, I have been able to learn from Gaudí, especially from his research methods such as the funicular model he built as an aid in designing the church on the workers' housing estate in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. Another set of plans we are drawing up, which are at the pre-planning stage, is for the Illa de Blanes. The method Gaudí used is entirely valid today thanks to the power of computers and we apply it using a structural program we have developed. Once the requirements of the project or program, such as the light, free height, the position of the pillars, etc., have been entered, the software finds the most rational way of understanding and resolving the structure. The formal result is surprisingly attractive". A. I.

Access to the CaixaForum Cultural Centre.
1999-2002
The Casaramona building, on the hillside of Montjuïc, was built in 1911 to house a textile mill. Classified as part of the country's cultural heritage in 1976, it has been recognised as an outstanding work of Catalan art nouveau, or Modernism, ever since.
Bearing this in mind, the main body of the factory was converted into an exhibition hall. The façade was preserved while the basement was dug up to make room for the main entrance next to the auditorium and the mediatheque.
The street leading into the courtyard plays an important role in the layout of the city. The courtyard, constructed below street level, is made up of limestone ashlar walls and a huge floating floor of the same material. A small, enclosed area, known as the Secret Garden, formed by these walls, is intended for staging open-air events. This stone composition also extends inside, forming a generous lobby.
The way up to the main level of the lobby is via stairs, escalators and lifts. To protect this route, a sculpture-like structure, known as "Tetsuju" (iron tree), made of corten steel with a glass roof, has been designed.
This construction, employing the technique of iron products, is evocative of Modernist Catalonia.

District 38: stage one. 2002
The proposal is to create a permeable, open block, with a 232 metre-long façade giving onto Passeig de la Zona Franca following the alignment of the street with the other three frontages slightly set back from it.
Inside the block, the "Eixample-type" blocks of flats are broken up and are no longer compact buildings. The six volumes are put together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle creating courtyards, passages and terraces whose purpose is to hollow out the traditional group of buildings bounded by streets on all four sides. In the last block, this inner hollow has been replaced by a single utilities and services core allowing for greater flexibility in fitting the pieces of the offices together, thereby reinforcing the concept of variability.
The new idea is to work in a completely open space, recognising that our proposal is just one of many possible solutions. The goal is to integrate several of these possible solutions into a building and offer each user a spatial, functional and volumetric layout to suit their particular needs. In this regard, special mention should be made of the work being done by the team under the architect Alejandro Zaera Polo, which has been given the job, during this first phase, of designing Block 2 of this network, while Arata Isozaki's team is designing Block 1.
To conclude, these are buildings that are able to assimilate change in a process that is still open and which will continue to be so for a considerable length of time.

Catalonia
Illa de Blanes. 1998
Illa de Blanes is intended to be a meeting place. It was born with the will to materialise itself physically in order to become a place of welcome, for living, experimenting and creating, at the same pace as history moves forward. It should therefore allow for renovation and recycling so as to be capable of adapting itself to the passage of time. A space is needed with the will to remain in place in order to take in other continually evolving spaces.
The elements that will give it this characteristic are the two superstructures that define the project: the "Great Roof" and the "Great Platform" giving shape to the space nearest the sea front.
These are the permanent elements that will withstand the passage of time and become the icon of the new Blanes: an icon that appears as an instrument of dialogue with its surroundings, with Blanes and its history, and will become the new reference point for its immediate surroundings, which are currently devoid of structure.
Over the coming years, the different contents will be put in place under the "Great Roof" and the "Great Platform". Given the dimensions involved and the intention of making this into a global architectural landmark, this will be done using a new construction system based on the theories of three-dimensional organic structures known as ESO (Evolutionary Structural Optimisation). This new system will enable these structures to be built with the smallest and most rational dimensions possible and still achieve the desired spatial features.

Page 50
Dominique Perrault

A Great city concerned about its identity
Dominique Perrault made his first visit to Barcelona in 1967 to collect the Mies van Der Rohe European Prize for Contemporary Architecture awarded by the foundation of the same name and the European Union. The French architect received the award for his design for the National Library of France.
"One of the things that most struck me about Barcelona on that occasion," Perrault recalled, "was its scale, neither very big nor very small, authentically human. It was a perfect size! It allows you to get about comfortably within the city and at the same time holds out great architectural possibilities."
Perrault, involved in the design of the future Barcelona in his capacity as adviser to the mayor Joan Clos, says that this appointment, with the regular ongoing contact with the city that it entails, has not made him change his opinions. "Not at all. I think the work being done on the evolution of the city -how to maintain it, but develop it at the same time- is extremely important. The aim is to attain the level of a great European city taking respect and affection for its own identity as the starting point. On the basis of my experience with the hotels I am building in Barcelona, I can confirm just how proud its inhabitants are to live in it. Even though the commission comes from private organisations, in addition to the actual architecture, they are concerned about the impact projects have on the city's skyline."
In regard to the work currently in progress in the Diagonal area and on the Forum, he says that "these are ambitious projects belonging to an overall plan, but they are also very specific. The Agbar Tower, the Forum building, the hotels are very specific buildings... They are projects in which the architectural risks have been taken on board with great courage."
Commenting on the projects he himself is engaged in in Barcelona and the surrounding area, Dominique Perrault pointed out that "the Badalona project is extremely important in my work from the technological and conceptual viewpoint, due both to the use of materials and its avant-garde conception".
"As for my projects in Barcelona, the vision shown by the investors has been of great importance. Private initiative is also looking for a new kind of town planning. In this specific case, it concerns a study of the sky-line based on recognition of the special characteristics of the place which features a stratification that begins with Jean Nouvel's Agbar Tower, continues with the hotels we are designing and ends at the Forum building by Herzog & de Meuron. These projects are being developed through a process of continual interaction between private enterprise and the City Council, as ever since the proposal was approved by the private sector, there has been ongoing consultation with the ruling local government coalition."

Hotel Nueva Diagonal
Barcelona can be "read" as a horizontal city, built according to the geometrical guidelines of the Cerdà Plan; but it can also be read as a vertical city with architectural examples such as the Sagrada Família, the towers of the Olympic Village and, above all, the neighbourhoods on the mountain round the communications tower and the Tibidabo. This reading of Barcelona has led us to devise a building whose base is integrated in the horizontal city while its vertical body and crown form part of the vertical city. This morphology creates a set of volumes with a "cubical" building acting as a counterpoint both behind and with the tower, a rectangular parallelepiped cut lengthwise in two, with one of its halves facing skywards. This breaking up of a "perfect geometric block" creates a movement of shape and volume that gives an urban meaning to the integration of the tower into the horizontal city.
The layout of the elementary shapes creates the building's signs of identity: a 25 metre-high canopy in the style of a loggia points towards the tower; a protuberance in the form of a cantilever creates a "crest" in the vertical sky-line; the cube is moved back to leave room for a small square in the form of a terrace that opens onto Carrer Lope de Vega. This set of shapes creates a new landmark in the newest part of the Diagonal, with the tower stretching up towards the sky.

Hotel Hesperia Diagonal and office block. 2002-04
A nine-storey four-star hotel with 114 double rooms and a 21-storey office block. Shopping and unloading area, underground car park.

Plans for the Torrent de Montigalà and sports complex. Badalona. Metropolitan Area. 1998.
The idea of protecting this valley as a natural, open space entirely given over to sports activities enables extremely appropriate use to be made of it by the surrounding neighbourhoods and allows the creation of a landscape in which nature and architecture blend together.
The desire "to not build" architectural objects that would obstruct the valley was the main idea in the plan put forward. The Badalona project is part of the construction of the contemporary landscape, building up a geographical configuration whose guidelines are drawn from the history of the place, whether it is peacefully old or furiously recent.
The project is open and flexible; it highlights the geography of the place and introduces founding events of a new development, such as the football stadium built in a crater that follows the curves of the topography, embedding itself in the terrain so that only its sun protection screen sticks out, as though it were a nomads' tent that had just been put up.

Page 55
Herzog & de Meuron

WORKING IN THE SAME DIRECTION AS BIOLOGY
The first design Herzog and de Meuron came up with for the for the Forum building consisted of a huge cube measuring 65 metres by 65, although they eventually opted for a horizontal block only 25 metres high to facilitate contact between people "naturally and uninhibitedly", as Herzog said in Barcelona in March 2001 at the public presentation of the project.
Supplementing the words of the then chief architect of Barcelona, Josep Antoni Acebillo, who described the building as "a manifesto of European, Catalan and Barcelona architecture against the excess of Americanisation", Herzog pointed out that "you can be modern while preserving local tradition. The opposite is stupid".
In a feature in the Sunday supplement of the newspaper El País published on 5 January 2003, Jacques Herzog described the Forum building in the following way: "An architect cannot control everything that is going to affect his building and keep it immaculate; that's why it's better to work in the same direction as biology. The building will be covered by a film of water. The birds will come there to drink. Next to the water a wet flora will spring up that will mark the façades until, little by little, it merges them into the landscape so that the building ceases to be an intruder".
"The idea of an architecture for permanence and survival made us credible as architects," the two Swiss said in their speech of acceptance of the Pritzker (2001) prize. "We believe in the permanence of buildings and the only key we have found for this relies on beauty. That is why we made buildings like jewels."

Forum 2004 Building and Square. 2002-04
The history, climate and customs of the inhabitants of Barcelona make this city a European metropolis almost predestined for outdoor spaces designed to function as living, socially heterogeneous urban places. That is why, instead of planning the building as a stand-alone object in an open public space, we decided to design a structure that would generate and articulate the public space. Moreover, the programme -which includes an auditorium with a capacity for 3,200 people, exhibition areas, lobbies, offices and a restaurant- will be organised horizontally, thereby ensuring maximum flexibility and functional versatility.
These nearly inescapable considerations led us to design a flat, elevated triangular shape. This shape not only provides a perfect fit with the perimeter of the project so that it covers the whole area, but is also the expression of the specific location of this place between the outer streets of Cerdà's orthogonal grid and Avinguda Diagonal.
The covered area under the volume will be a hybrid space offering a combination of urban typologies. A series of courtyards running across the elevated structure establishes a complex interaction between the covered open-air spaces and the different levels of the Forum building, constantly creating new viewing angles and ever-changing light effects.
In order to generate and maintain vitality and diversity, additional amenities such as an open-air market with a large fountain, a chapel, a bar and other simple facilities complementing the conference and exhibition centres are needed. It will be a place that will attract all kinds of people: tourists and locals, culture-lovers and conference attendees, young and old.

Page 59
David Chipperfield

Ciutat de la Justícia
Barcelona and Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Metropolitan Area. 2003-2007
In 2002, David Chipperfield Architects, in association with b720 Arquitectura, made a successful bid to design the new Ciutat de la Justícia, or City of Justice, in Barcelona and Hospitalet de Llobregat. This building is to be erected between the two cities and will have good links to some of the main transport routes in the Barcelona area. The site, which has two disused army barracks on it, is in an area in the throes of a major urban redevelopment process. It lies between Gran Via, a wide avenue running right through Barcelona, and Avinguda del Carrilet, which links Hospitalet and Barcelona.
The plans divide the huge area (330,000 square metres) required to house this project into eight buildings joined by a continuous, elongated, covered space four storeys high. Each of the eight buildings has courtrooms on the first four floors, while the offices and other rooms attached to the courtrooms are on the upper floors. Seven of the buildings will contain the courts of Barcelona and the eighth will meet the needs of Hospitalet de Llobregat.
All the buildings have a two-layer glass-covered façade comprising strips of different colours. The texture of the glass is formed by horizontal strips and varies in density depending on the function of the space behind the façade.

Page 63
Toyo Ito

A WISH FOR BARCELONA
"In 1971, 32 years ago, I visited Barcelona for the first time. Since then, particularly from the eighties and nineties onwards, the number of visits has increased exponentially so that over the past few years I have been coming to Barcelona every two or three months. This situation is very nearly ideal for me, since, as I always say, if I had the chance to live in Europe, Barcelona would be the city I would choose to live in. Its brightness, its intense sunlight, the penetrating blue of its sky and sea, is something you won't find so easily in Japan. So, under this sun, under this sky, there are thousands of memories... My encounter with Gaudí's architecture, the talk by the pond of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, staggering about with alcohol-induced euphoria in La Barceloneta...
In this world there are cities that absorb our energy or beautiful urban environments lacking any stimulus whatsoever. On the contrary, in Barcelona -and that is where my attraction to the city lies- there exists a capacity for transmitting energy and courage to creators. This is something I have always received from it. Perhaps the reason for this transmission of energy comes from its troubled history. I believe all creative activity comes from a feeling of anger, frustration or the intense desire to change something. In this city, everywhere I go I can feel this energy that, together with the optimism and affection of its people, gives me the strength to create.
The continual feeling of closeness and confidence Barcelona arouses in me is reflected in my personal approach to the architecture of A. Gaudí. When I was able to look upon his work for the first time, in 1971, I had a sensation of incompatibility. At that time I had just begun my professional career. The picture of a column rising up over a tortoise was something I could enjoy only as a tourist, but I could not find any suggestions in it for my work. And this was something very different from my encounters with the work of other famous architects such as Le Corbusier or Mies. But in the eighties and nineties that distance with regard to Gaudí's work quickly diminished, as the theme of my architecture had turned towards the watery, the arboreal, the flowing, the organic. Up until then my work, based on the symbolism and geometry of modern architecture, spoke of what was transparent and light. It was particularly as a result of the Sendai Mediatheque project -whose tubular structure has decisively influenced my subsequent projects- that I re-read space in terms of dynamism and fluidity.
In this way, Gaudí's work has become a source of thousands of suggestions in my conceptual work. If, in principle, we understand architecture fundamentally as a hard, fixed existence, in Gaudí, by contrast, it becomes organic and alive. In this sense, the continuous spatial fluidity of his work impresses me andis beyond me.
Nowadays we have a tool that did not exist in Gaudí's time, the computer, with which we can analyse complex structures. Alongside the new materials, what new architectural will can we create?
Fortunately, I have had the privilege of designing the Fira 2000 - Montjuïc-2 project and as a result I shall get closer to the architecture of Gaudí. I sincerely hope that the city of Barcelona will lend me its creative energy..." T. I.

Project for the enlargement of Fira de Barcelona, Montjuïc - 2
Completion scheduled for between 2008 and 2011
As a consequence of the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona underwent a major change with the construction of nume
rous facilities in the city. Now the coastal area is being developed for the Forum 2004 which will be built by 2004.
Montjuïc - 2 is a plan for enlarging La Fira that should contribute to Barcelona's development after the Forum. This project is of great importance, as it will play a symbolic role in the city.
The total surface area is about 240,000 square metres and will constitute one of the leading trade fair facilities in the world. Divided into five areas, new installations will be built in each of them.
1. Gran Via Gate: twin towers, including offices and a hotel as well as business facilities.
2. Zona Franca Gate: the entrance lobby, including Fira de Barcelona and an auditorium with conference halls and a space for exhibitions.
3. Amadeu Torner Gate: an entrance lobby and an exhibition space with a dome.
4. Central axis: a space allowing dynamic, fluid access integrating the whole project. One kilometre long, all the installations converge on it.
5. Façade giving onto Carrer de les Ciències and Carrer del Foc: a cityscape and façade that include natural elements such as water and trees.
The work is due to be completed between 2008 and 2011.

Page 67
MVRDV

Noah's Ark
Preliminary conceptual design for the Palace of Biodiversity at the Forum. 2001
Situated in the Barcelona Forum 2004, in the area where the Diagonal meets the sea, the Palace of Biodiversity will constitute a landmark that will make up for the neutrality of the other buildings. Whereas the square and the conference centre, in the shape of a portico, have been designed for the communicative aspects of the Forum, the Palace may be regarded as a contemplative messenger and a reminder of what the Forum is about: the wealth needed by the planet and its ecological demands.
The collection housed by the building consists of stuffed birds and other animals, skeletons, insects, embryos, stones, gems and fossils, films, slides, real plants, bacteria, live plants and termites, diagrams, real landscapes and live link-ups to the zoo via cameras.
All the attractiveness of the world's incredible biological wealth is shown by creating a large number of different habitats in different rooms, each with its own presentation, size and representation; each with its own climate, temperature, protection from the sun, water requirements, etc.
You can visit the Palace sequentially, as these spaces are arranged in linear order.
The Palace is therefore a "library" containing hundreds of rooms, with hundreds of bioclimates for the city. This "library" has been designed as a continuous area, a promenade, a continuous route winding its way round an empty central space from which you can see the entire collection, all the species.
The world back to front: the visitor is surrounded by the world, is in the world.

The RegionMaker: HyperCatalunya
The RegionMaker optimising machinery has been tried out in developing "scenarios" of what Catalonia might be like in 2050. Conceived as a transparent framework for making decisions, the RegionMaker is intended to provide Catalonia with various possible ways of transforming itself and also changing the role it plays in the Spanish, European and global arena. However, it is not up to us to make the final decisions regarding population flow management, so we have focused on determining the necessary links between population dynamics and how the territory is configured and have defined 72 possible results. These range from a global megacity model to a model of a defensive wall of Catalan nationalism. The object is for the population and the Catalan authorities to decide democratically their own destiny.
The RegionMaker is a tool developed by MVRDV for analysing and optimising the spatial configuration of a particular region. This mechanism organises the existing information to help the user to visualise their own purposes or decisions.
In the RegionMaker, the world is made up of small items divided into categories. Each item possesses certain characteristics that describe its influences and requirements in a three-dimensional space. Thus there is a difference between the characteristics of, for example, houses, offices, water and agriculture. Based on these characteristics, each item will find its own place in the three-dimensional world. Once the parameters have been defined, the RegionMaker can process the relevant information stored in the database and rapidly find the most appropriate configuration for the region. The scenarios are created, therefore, as a direct result of the analysis.

Cerdà Barcelona 3D. Poblenou
This is a reinterpretation of the Cerdà typology. The project is faced with the question of how to combine the typical Barcelona blocks with various kinds of public spaces such as covered squares, elevated squares, alleyways, mini-neighbourhoods and public spaces in the third dimension.

Page 70
Zaha Hadid


THE TRANSFORMATION OF A COMPLEX SPACE
The Anglo-Iranian architect Zaha Hadid visited Barcelona last May to collect the Mies van Der Rohe Prize for Contemporary Architecture awarded by the foundation of the same name. Hadid received the award for the Hohenheim Nord tram terminal in Strasbourg.
On that occasion she made a statement justifying her plans for Plaça de les Arts on the basis of the need to "connect a large zone of cultural facilities in the Plaça de les Glòries area, next to the future Design Museum, and to link the already existing elements, such as the National Theatre of Catalonia and the Auditorium, to the new space. The square is also the roof of a building with a winding interior containing 25 cinemas.
Hadid expressed her satisfaction at receiving the award and said, "I like it because it is presented in Barcelona, a city that I love, and also because of the name it bears, Mies van der Rohe, a seminal figure in architecture, a radical creator, with whom I am pleased to be associated". Commenting on the avant-garde label that is commonly pinned on her, she said, "As a professional, what I try to do is see how far I can go by taking architecture to its limits".

Plaça de les Arts. 2001
The symbiotic relationship between the amenities building and the square directs and determines the cross-sections and the volumes of the whole, so that the final outcome is the result of an intimate negotiation between the two.
The building is to be Barcelona's cultural reference point in relation to the cinema and so, in addition to a cinema complex, it must also include a space for cultural activities, premières, galas, press conferences and parties to do with the film world, an independent restaurant, and shops to do with related activities such as a bookshop or video shop.
The ground floor of the building is confined between Carrer Tànger, Carrer Bolívia, the new section of Carrer Pamplona and the boundary of the property belonging to the railway. It will be at least 15 to 20 metres from the railway lines.
All the functional elements of the complex are easily accessible to both pedestrians and vehicles. They have a large number of links to the public space of the project, with Plaça de les Arts on the upper level and Carrer Tànger, Carrer Bolívia and Carrer Àlaba on the lower level.
A description is given here of the system of entrances to and exits from the building as a whole, followed by a more detailed description of the architectural and distributive features of each of the building's functional units.

Page 74
Richard Rogers

The Bullring. 2000
Richard Rogers Partnership and the Alonso i Balaguer architects' studio working with them were commissioned by the Barcelona-based developer, Sacresa, to turn the city's bullring into a leisure and entertainment complex open every day round the clock. The new project will become a gateway into Barcelona from the west and a major reference point for the Plaça d'Espanya transport interchange area.
The new design proposes keeping and restoring the existing façade which will form a new circular precinct for a variety of entertainment activities. New squares will be created on the ground floor linking the new complex to the existing metro stations and Parc Joan Miró to the north. A floating terrace-roof with a flexible canopy over it will form a square in the sky with striking panoramic views of the city. Inside, the building will contain various areas dedicated to shop and business premises, entertainment, health and leisure round a central space where events can be held. Part of the building will house a multiplex cinema. The structure will provide enough flexibility to enable changes to be made and different activities to be accommodated. The building will have approximately 40,000 square metres above ground level for various activities and an underground car park with a capacity for 1,250 cars.

Hotel Hesperia.
Hospitalet de Llobregat. Metropolitan Area.
1999-2004
The site, badly affected by industrial contamination, is situated in the municipality of Hospitalet de Llobregat, the second largest city in Catalonia. It is ten kilometres east of the city and next to a motorway linking the centre of Barcelona to the airport.
Richard Rogers Partnership, in collaboration with the Barcelona-based Alonso i Balaguer architects' studio, has been chosen to design a new five-star hotel and conference centre on the western edge of Barcelona. The site is beside the avenue connecting the city and the airport. The project introduces a variety of uses into an area which already contains blocks of flats, hospitals and sports centres. The central item is a 29-storey hotel that will create an eye-catching gateway into Barcelona. In addition to the 304-room hotel, there will be a 4,500 square metre conference centre with a capacity for 1,800 people, a 400-seat auditorium, a 1,500 square metre building serving as the Hesperia headquarters and a 5,900 square metre sports club.
The outline of the project has now been finalised and the detailed design work began in September 2002. The building work is expected to be completed by spring 2004. Work on the foundations and the underground floors is already under way.
Viladecans Business Park
Metropolitan Area. 2001
The design of the buildings, by Richard Rogers Partnership and Alonso i Balaguer, is a direct response to the particular location of the site. The prevailing wind is from the north, with sea breezes coming in from the south. In addition there are catabatic winds sweeping down the river valley. These winds are channelled through and round the buildings to provide a free nighttime cooling system and good ventilation. To furnish the southern face of each building with efficient shade, a combination of a projecting roof and angled solar panels has been proposed. These panels will supply a limited amount of power, but will comply with Barcelona's current requirements. Another proposal is to use suitably arranged solar panels on the roof. In view of the water available, each building will be equipped with a waste water tank that will enable a system to be put in place for re-using such water and watering the green areas. RRP is very interested in establishing an environmental strategy for the whole area.
RRP suggests a surface area of 5,000 square metres for each office building and is also studying several plans and cross-sections of the project with a view to increasing the potential surface area to 10,000 square metres.

OFFICES AND THE MOBILITY MUSEUM (MUSEU DE LA MOBILITAT) IN LA SAGRERA

At the planning stage
The building of the new La Sagrera intermodal station, in the Sant Andreu-La Sagrera railway triangle, will contribute to the transformation of the area that has been going on over the past few years. The restructuring of this part of the city will enable the consolidation of the traditional civic axes of the districts of Sant Andreu and Sant Martí, as well as the creation of new ones, with the elimination of the historical barrier formed by the railway lines. The new facilities, which will include a high speed train station, will be underground and the surrounding area will be made up of a linear park over five kilometres long as well as 8,500 new dwellings, 60,000 square metres of offices and various amenities. This setting has been chosen by the Council's town planning committee as the site for Gehry's first constructions in the city. The commission consists of two adjacent buildings, one for offices, the other to house the Mobility Museum. Gehry is currently working on the preliminary studies for both buildings, although it is safe to predict that they will be in the architect's spectacular, emblematic style.

The Olympic Village (Vila Olímpica). The Fish Sculpture. 1992
From the very beginning of his professional career, Frank Gehry has investigated the expressive freedoms provided by a formal analysis of fish. In the 80s he designed several objects that explored these possibilities. In this case, on the occasion of the Barcelona Olympic Games, he was commissioned to design an item -almost sculptural in nature- for the marina area between the Mapfre tower and Hotel de les Arts. Gehry came up with a huge steel structure in the shape of a fish whose golden reflections mark the start of the Olympic marina promenade.

Page 78
Jaume Sisa: a spiritual geography of Barcelona
by Karles Toma
Director of the Institute for Government and Public Policy, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Barcelona has been the principal setting for his life, and also for some of his most important songs. True to his anarchist, surrealistic and ironic style, Jaume Sisa has composed such small marvels as "Han tancat la Rambla", "Cançó de la Font del Gat" or "La catedral". In 1982, his infatuation for Barcelona made him bring out a whole album - "Barcelona Postal" - about the city, in collaboration with conceptual artist Antoni Miralda.
Born in 1948 in the "Poble Sec" district, Jaume Sisa considers that his Barcelona "stretches from Montjuic to the Ciutadella Park, and from the Gran Vía downwards (the upper part of the city is inhabited by strange people about whom I know nothing at all…)". The famous author of "Qualsevol nit pot sortir el sol" also believes, like the Sioux, that "the first seven years of life are the most important ones and, from that time on, everything that happens is a repetition". Next, Jaume Sisa retraces his life's itinerary through different districts of the city, thus outlining a kind of spiritual geography of Barcelona.

POBLE SEC: "I lived in the "Poble Sec" district until I was eighteen years old and, years later, I went back to live there for some time. Which means that I've lived the most important part of my life in "Poble Sec"; it is my homeland. Concretely, carrer Poeta Cabanyes, and, more particularly, the upper stretch of the street. I still have dreams about those times when I was a child and played in that street.
In the nineteen fifties, "Poble Sec" was a working-class neighbourhood, as they said; it was not even considered to be middle-class. The district was located between Montjuic and the "Paral.lel" and, even though it was in the centre of the city and close to the harbour area, it was somehow a different world or, at least, that's how I felt about it".
(…)
MONTJUIC.: "I remember my childhood as a wonderful period of time: I was always running around, up and down the hill, fighting with stones with the Gipsies, playing in the streets all day, it was fantastic!... My father loved to walk through the woods, to be surrounded by nature, you know; he was a "boletaire", a mushroom picker. Sometimes, we went on afternoon picnics to Montjuic and we walked up to the Castle or towards the "Exhibition site", as we called it, the area where the "Teatre Grec", the "Font del Gat" and the "Palau d'Esports" ("Sports Palace") were located, an area which had already been developed and landscaped at that time. My father was not actually an expert, but he taught me a few things about the world of nature".(…)
PARAL.LEL: "The boundaries of my world were the mountain and the harbour, the sea, because, on our way back from Montjuic, we used to go to the harbour. And, down below, there was the "Paral.lel" district, which I identified with the city proper, the density, the concentration of the dynamics of things, the heavy traffic, the tramways, the theatres, the crowds, the intensity of life. When I was a child, the "Paral.lel" area appeared to me as a mythical space, because I often heard about it at home. More particularly because of my mother, who liked to voice her recollections of the "Paral.lel" district prior to the Civil War, under the Republic… and that was one hell of a place! A paradise full of theatres, cinemas, bars and cabarets which stayed open all night and where the atmosphere was lively at any hour. For me, it was the very embodiment of "fiesta", that's the way I idealized it. Years later, when I got to know the place in person, I was still able to pick up remnants of that special atmosphere, but the "Paral-lel" was no longer its pre-war self. Nowadays, you could say that it does not exist anymore". (…)
EL XINO: "When I started working, I was already going out with my friends on Sundays. We were fourteen or fifteen years old at that time and our own special sport was to go and have a look at the whores in the "Barri Xino", the so-called "Chinese" quarter. (…)
My memories of the "Barri Xino" are so glorious! We always ended up on carrer Robadors, a rather long and narrow street lined with bars and "meublés"…, with a steady flow of women going in and coming out. Women kept walking by us, in dozens! There were no blacks among them at that time, only white-skinned women, most of them immigrants, with a few Catalan girls thrown in.(...)
LA RAMBLA (I): (…) "The "Rambla" was already a "riff-raff" world, it was not like the "Paral.lel" district. The "Paral.lel" was the myth and the "Rambla" was the real world, inhabited by a variegated and hard-boiled fauna.
I remember that, one day, we went to have a drink at the "Cosmos" bar and, for me, the "Cosmos" bar was already the world. I was a big boy then but I had never had sex with a woman yet, not even with a prostitute; the maximum I had achieved was some clumsy groping and a few wet kisses in a dark corner, and that's all… And I think that, for me, discovering the "Rambla" marked my awakening, my actual initiation into the world. Until that moment, it is as if I had merely lived off bubbles of reality. On the "Rambla", I realized that the world had to be very big indeed.
Apart from the "Rambla", when I was sixteen or seventeen, I started to frequent some places in the "Gracia" district, such as "San Carlos" or "Guiri Guiri", which were trendy "yé-yé" dance halls… And also "Stereo", on plaça Sanllehí. Actually the real name of that place was "Salón Sanllehí" but, on Sundays, there was another sign underneath that said "Stereo", because it sounded classier. This lasted until I turned eighteen, left home and went to France!".
THE GOTHIC QUARTER AND ARC DEL TEATRE: "When I came back to Barcelona one year and a half later, I went to live behind the City Hall, on carrer Ataulfo, and I took to going to bars like "El Paraguas" and "El Ascensor". (…)
Later, I lived for a while on carrer Lancaster, behind carrer Nou, where you could find the "Bodega Bohemia". (…) Similar to, or maybe even worse than the "Bodega Bohemia", there was the "Cadiz" bar, which stood close to "Pastis", a seedy, decaying dance hall that a small band tried to bring to life. (…) In the "Cadiz" bar, the atmosphere was darker and grottier and the clients were mostly mercenaries and seamen… In those years, Barcelona was always crowded with American marines.
In the "Arc del Teatre" neighbourhood of that time, the "London" bar was the leading place with its vintage turn-of-the-century décor and its circus atmosphere. We also went to "Enfants Terribles", "Jazz Colón", "Villa Rosa" (nowadays it is a techno-music club called "Moog") and "Tabú"… Ah! I almost leave out an important place, "Copacabana", located on the "Rambla", on the site the "Museu de Cera" (Waxworks Museum) is presently standing. (...)
LA RIBERA: "Between 1975 and 1980, Barcelona burst out; an explosion took place and, in my opinion, "Zeleste" was at the centre of it. We're talking about a change of era, a change of regime, a change of too many things, in which I and my generation got caught up when we were between twenty and thirty years old, an age when you've got such a strong urge to do things, when you're ready to set the world on fire. During those years, I always went to "Zeleste", because I had started to drink whisky. Before hat, I mean in the early seventies, I had tried to get into "Bocaccio", but they did not let me in because I was not famous and they did not like the way I looked. Well, to tell the truth, I never got past the Gran Vía…
In the "Ribera" district, everything happened in the wake of "Zeleste". Near by, there was the "Magic" nightclub, where they also had live performances, and a series of bars such as "La Palma", "Miramelindo", "Berimbau", "Rodri" and "El Nus", which are still there. There was also "La Ceca", which stood on a very narrow little street behind "Zeleste" and was a fantastic place; anyway, it did not last long because of the neighbours' constant complaints. (…)
MADRID-BARCELONA: "I went to Madrid at the end of 1985 and I lived there for the following fifteen years. During that time, when I came to Barcelona, I always stayed in hotels because I liked to feel like an outsider. Therefore, you could say that I've "lived" Barcelona from a distance for a long time, and that I've experienced the tremendous changes that have taken place here from the outside.
I suffered a lot in the nineteen nineties because, every time I came to Barcelona, whack!, I discovered they had cut out a parcel of it. A parcel that was part of my sentimental life, part of my youth… The passing of time eventually allowed me to come back to Barcelona without feeling hurt".
THE RAMBLA (II): "I've been living on the "Rambla" for one year now.. And it's as if Destiny had helped to make my dreams come true: I went to live in Madrid because I wanted to see Barcelona through an outsider's eyes, and now that I am back, I'm living on the "Rambla", which is the ideal place for an outsider. I'm living in a building in which all dwellers are foreigners and, when I go out, it's as if I were anywhere in the world, in whichever tourist Mecca, let's say.
Today, the "Rambla" is the most depersonalized and neutral, ambiguous and aseptic place you can possibly think of. And, to tell the truth, I am a little annoyed with the City Council because the "Rambla" has become a mere showcase for tourists, it has no life in itself. It is as if it had been turned into a film set, arranged as the main street in a western… It's nothing but a show".
GAUDI AND THE SAGRADA FAMILIA: "Without Gaudí, Barcelona would undoubtedly be different because, all things considered, it's a city with little inclination to fly. Fortunately, there is Gaudí and there are personages like Pujols because, actually, the city is dominated by the "Masters" of Barcelona, wealthy people from the "Eixample" district and the upper part of the city who belong to "the hundred Catalan families".
While I was going through Barcelona looking for an apartment (I finally bought one in the "Raval" district), I had the opportunity to experience a very strange phenomenon in the surroundings of the "Sagrada Familia" church, a place where you get the feeling that it is full of little Martians, of grey people who do not really exist. It is a phenomenon which happens only there, maybe because the "Sagrada Familia" church, just like the Montserrat convent, has become a telluric power centre which absorbs so much energy… it's like a nuclear explosion, and it's as if everything around it - blocks and blocks of houses - had been destroyed.(...)
URBAN JOURNEYS; "From time to time, I like to travel to Badalona, to Santa Coloma or to Bellvitge. You take the Metro and you arrive at a place you don't know anything about; you look around, you take a walk, you let yourself imbibe the atmosphere, you take a breath, you get into a bar, you talk to somebody, or you do anything else you feel like doing, and then you go back home. (…) It is an enriching journey that gives you experience and provides you with a measure of how big the world is. We could say that it's like going to faraway foreign places.(...)

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FROM THE CAMPUS: A faculty with an energizing effect on the "Raval" district.
by Josep Playà

The "Raval" area has become the most dynamic and changing section of Barcelona. That district made of narrow streets and decaying houses, which fascinated foreign travellers but was actually uninhabitable, has lately experienced a process of urban transformation of such magnitude that it was even considered a cinematic phenomenon by film director Jose Luis Guerín. Such an evolution has been running parallel with a steadily increasing presence of immigrant settlers, thus creating a melting pot of cultures in the surroundings of the "Museu d'Art Contemporani" (Macba, Museum of Contemporary Art), the "Centre de Cultura Contemporánia" (CCCB, Barcelona Centre of Contemporary Culture) and the "Biblioteca de Catalunya" (Catalan National Library), a list of cultural facilities to which a new university campus is now being added on.
The first institution to settle in the district was the Pompeu Fabra University. As a result of it, an area marked by street prostitution, considered to be dangerous and with little appeal for tradesmen was swiftly reconverted into a neighbourhood attractive enough for real-estate businesses to step in and repair numerous buildings and façades, and for new restaurants and shops to appear on the scene. Later, the Ramon Llull University led the way into the "Raval" area by opening its Faculty of Journalism on carrer Valldonzella. That school, though carrying little weight in democratic terms, was of great symbolic value. And, undoubtedly, one of the best examples of that "synergy" - a word repeatedly used by politicians - was the creation of the "Ciutat Vella" magazine by teachers and students from the Faculty of Journalism, a publication that offered a new point of view on the district, setting aside the usual stereotypes centred on delinquency and social exclusion. However, the real "coup de theatre" for the "Raval" district will be the building of the University of Barcelona's Faculty of Geography and History on carrer Montalegre, right in front of the CCCB. But not as much where the new building itself is concerned, even though it will also have a considerable visual impact, as because it will mean the presence of some 5.000 young students and at least 300 teachers. Immediate effects are to be expected. As a matter of fact, photocopy shops, art galleries and restaurants have already started to pull into position in the area, spurred on by the prospect of September 2004, the date at which - if things are carried out according to schedule - the first students should start to arrive. (…)

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The Forum's clock is keeping good time.

Last May marked a turning point for Barcelona's 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. The weight of symbolism in our society made a clear-cut approach necessary: when there was only one year till the event itself, the project-managing team considered that this "anniversary" was the ideal time to address public opinion and give a thorough explanation on the present state of the project. Consequently, a series of press conferences were held over a whole week, with the sole intention of explaining at what stage stood the organization of an event meant to be a milestone in our city's history, as significant as other events such as last century's Universal Exhibitions or the 1992 Olympic Games. As the general manager of the Forum himself, Jordi Oliveras, stated in words that almost sounded as a public commitment: "Today, we may say that the Forum's clock is keeping good time".
In spite of the election campaign, the month of May proved to be a decisive time as the starting point of the information campaign addressed to the people of Barcelona. From now on, the public should become familiar with the daily publication of details aimed at completing and developing the global vision and perception of the Forum by way of a succession of messages constantly directed at the citizens from the news media. According to the city councillor and Forum delegate, Jaume Pagès, "2003 will be the year of communication, participation and co-operation". Co-operation between civil society, institutions, businesses and other organizations in order to bring life to a large-scale meeting of a kind there is no precedent in history, which means that we lack reliable general data or background information that could be used as a frame of references. No city has ever hosted a 141-day gathering intended to find answers to the questions being raised in our world, a kind of summit meeting the raison d'être of which is centred on three issues that are fundamental at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the conditions of peace, sustainability and cultural diversity. (…)

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Joan Matabosch, the discreet fire-raiser
by Jordi Casanovas


Joan Matabosch is one of the professionals who took over the responsibility for the renovation of the "Gran Teatre del Liceu" building in its artistic aspects and of the following opening of the centenarian institution to different sectors of the audience and, all things considered, of the radically new turn in its social function. The post-fire "Liceu" will never be the same opera house it was before 1994, even though its new gilt ornaments and mouldings are exact replica of the old ones.
Let's remember that the scheme for updating the theatre started to take shape in the nineteen eighties, after the public institutions had committed themselves to active participation in its running, in view of the old owners' incapacity to manage it on their own. The opera house project requires a large-scale mobilization of creative energies and material means. This is why today it has almost become a "state" issue, given that it calls for actions on a scale private initiatives cannot possibly provide for. It is therefore to be expected that the public entitled to use it can no longer be exclusively limited to some artistic or social elites.
The idea of a "Liceu belonging to all", as the slogan coined in 1999 proclaims, had already been publicly introduced prior to the fire, but it had met with serious difficulties at all levels: juridical, technical, architectural and artistic. There were so many obstacles that the only step ahead had been an agreement to a "minimum" modification plan. However, by a sad irony, a spark would soon oblige authorities to adopt a "maximum" reconstruction scheme. (…)
Joan Matabosch's links with the "Liceu" opera house - through the discreet channel of helping co-ordinate and plan the requested actions - date back from that period. At that time, he was a young journalist in a precarious job situation, who was undoubtedly deeply knowledgeable about opera, judging from the reviews he wrote and his talent for expressing the caustic comments he let slip out now and then, but nobody knew much about him, not enough, at least, to be able to foresee that he would one day end up officiating at the high altar in the Rambla's illustrious "temple".