Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish province of Catalonia, was an epicenter of 20thcentury
architectural vanguardism. The city’s geographic position on the northeast face of
the Iberian Peninsula—ostensibly with its back to the Castilian capital of Madrid and its
face toward the Mediterranean countries of Europe and North Africa—has sustained its
cosmopolitan dimensions throughout its history. From the century’s onset and the
separatist-regionalist concepts associated with Catalan modernisme, Barcelona’s architectural
primacy has endured two dictatorships, the suppression of its people’s native language,
and the dramatic social upheavals associated with industrial expansion and rapid
population growth.
From the mid-19th century, Barcelona’s municipal authorities sought to cope with the
newly industrialized city’s adolescence. The socialist Ildefonso Cerdà i Sunyer (1815–76)
created a Haussmannian solution for unifying Barcelona’s Old City with the independent
villages of the periphery (Cerdà plan, 1859). He focused on building a new connective
corridor of regularized grids—the district known as the Eixample (“extension” or “new
town”)—which he envisioned as the embodiment of the social panorama, where different
classes could coexist harmoniously and nonhierarchically. By the early 20th century, the
plan was deemed obsolete, and an international competition was announced to resolve the
city’s increasingly problematic geographic and demographic expansion. French Beaux-
Arts architect Léon Jaussely (1875–1932) won the competition and presented the city
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with a less radical attempt to address the city’s urbanization. This attempt was partially
implemented in 1917. Barcelonese philosopher Eugeni d’Ors (1881–1954) directly
observed the flowering of Catalonian culture during these years and proclaimed the new
Zeitgeist “Noucentisme,” a rebirth of ancient Rome’s legacy in the region.
The dynamically autonomous spirit of Catalonian architecture proclaimed itself in a
visual opponent of this heralded classicism: Barcelona’s version of Spanish modernisme. With
pronounced Art Nouveau influences combined with regionalist flair in both materials and
construction techniques, Catalan modernisme became the province’s most political aesthetic
movement. Antoni y Cornet y Gaudí’s (1852–1926) highly charged, colorful, and poetic
combination of osteomorphic, zoomorphic, and baroque forms challenged the traditional
Herreran architecture that dominated the peninsula’s public commissions, thus asserting
the distinctiveness of Catalonian culture as anti-Madrileño. Catalan modernisme’s heart was
established along Barcelona’s wide Passeig de Gràcia, a major artery leading from the
north corner of the city’s Plaça de Catalunya into, ironically enough, Cerdà’s Eixample
district. Here, progressive middle-class patrons, following the lead of Gaudí’s Count
Eusebio Güell (1847–1918), commissioned private homes from this new generation of
urban architects. The personalized visions of Gaudí’s Casa Batllò (1907), Lluís
Domenèch i Montaner’s Casa Lleó Morera (1906), and Josep Puig i Cadafalch’s Casa
Amattler (1900) contributed expressiveness to an otherwise neoclassical urban sector,
creating the district’s anticontextualist Manzana de la Dis cordia (Apple of Discord).
One finds among the modernisme architects a romantic engagement with medieval vernacular
forms and local construction materials such as brick and ceramic tile, a rhetorical
vocabulary associated with cultural tradition, local topography, climate, and vegetation.
A distinctively Catalonian mode of vaulting was practiced by Gaudí, Domènech, and the
younger Josep Ma Jujol i Gibert (1879–1949): an elasticine fireproof vault comprised of
laminated layers of ceramic tiles bonded together with reinforced concrete that could be
configured into a variety of geometric or biomorphic forms and that could span
considerable widths without structural reinforcement. Jujol’s Church at Vistebella (1923)
near Tarragona and Montserrat Sanctuary (1936) and close to Montferri, abandoned at
the outbreak of Spanish civil war, employed Catalonian vaults in neo-Gothic formations,
combining local brick and ceramics with iron and concrete to result in religious spaces
imbued with poetic references to both God and nation.
Catalan modernisme’s effect on the city lessened in the 1920s, with the death of two of its major
exponents: Gaudí and Domènech (d. 1923). By 1929 a new architectural language
affected the city by virtue of the International Exhibition. This exhibition was dictator
Miguel Primo de Rivera’s (1923–30) reconstitution of an Electrical Industries Exhibition
that had been conceived nearly a decade earlier. Mies van der Rohe’s epoch-making
German Pavilion (1929), built on the city’s acropolis Montjuïc, introduced the city to the
Bauhaus idiom. Farther up the hill, Poble Espanyol (1928) presented the same exhibition
audience with an “ideal Spanish village,” an amalgamation of the peninsula’s traditional
architecture and the manifestation of the Viennese Camillo Sitte’s urban planning
schemes. The coexistence of structural purity and folkloric vernacular would reverberate
in Barcelona’s architecture for much of the century.
The 1930s saw the dissolution of Rivera’s dictatorship, the institution of a
new state government (the Second Republic, 1931–39), and the
reestablishment of a semiautonomous Catalonian government, the
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Generalitat (1932–39). The latter fostered an acceptance of Republican
ideals and created a climate hospitable to Catalonian architects interested
in using the state’s ideology as the basis for urban projects.
Casa Albert Lleó i Morera, Barcelona,
designed by Lluís Domenèch
Montaner (1905)
Many of these
young builders were part of the Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos
Españoles para la Arquitectura Contemporánea (GATEPAC)—the Spanish wing of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and the
Comité International pour la Réalisation des Problèmes d’Architecture Contemporaine
(CIRPAC)—which emerged with four distinctive regional groups: East, North, West, and
South. Grup d’Artistes i Tècnics Catalans pe Progrés de l’Arquitectra Contemporània
(GATCPAC), the Barcelona-based East group, was arguably the most influential of them
all, establishing direct and enduring connections with its European counterparts to the
extent that Le Corbusier himself assisted in creating the Macià plan (1935), a massive
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and radical project for reorganizing this working-class city into a communal utopia of
high-density courtyard housing. GATCPAC’s seven-story Casa Bloc (1936, altered)
allowed the young architects to construct the distinctive type of urban dwelling associated
with the Maciá plan and Le Corbusier’s à redent housing.
Josep Lluís Sert (1902–83), later the dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of
Design, inaugurated GATCPAC’s rationalism both with his Muntaner Apartment
Building (1931), a variation on the theme of balancing the private and the public, and
most markedly with his Dispensario Central Antituberculoso (1938, by Sert, Joan
Subirana, and Josep Torres i Clavé), a leading exemplar of hygienic modernism and
architectural economy that made use of traditional Catalonian vaulting. Sert, who had
been an assistant to Le Corbusier in Paris from 1929 to 1931, closely emulated the
refined proportional relationships, sense of color, and texture that epitomized the Swiss
architect’s works. Sert’s Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Artes
et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris—which housed Picasso’s Guernica and populist
imagery in photomontages and other visual media—introduced the international
architectural community to the group’s dialectic and the Second Republic’s liberalist
stance. Despite GATCPAC’s visionary aims of urbanistic reform and their ability to
disseminate their ideals through the magazine A.C. (1931–37), resources were significantly
limited during the period, and thus the promise of socially driven rationalism remained
primarily a Utopian dream and not an actuality.
Spain’s civil war (1936–39) devastated the Iberian Peninsula and especially resulted in
destruction in the nation’s eastern provinces; in Barcelona, churches were damaged or
completely destroyed and building projects effectively halted. The victorious
authoritarian New Régime of General Franco (1939–75) associated the country’s various
avant-garde movements with left-wing political sensibilities, and subsequently, modernist
movement architecture was actively discouraged. In the nation’s urban centers, the new
official architecture prescribed to the legacy of grandiose neoclassical academicism; in
rural Spain, post-civil war architecture hearkened back to a whimsical folk vernacular.
Sert and other vanguard architects exiled themselves from their homeland; those who
chose to stay either sustained themselves by constructing “patriotic” buildings that
followed the state’s doctrines and guidelines, subsisted on the limited patronage of the
private sector, or stopped building altogether.
The reclusive José Antonio Coderch y de Sentmenat (1913–84) found work designing
Mediterranean villas of a regionalist and at times Expressionistic bent, such as his Ugalde
House (1952; Caldetes, Barcelona), and also sought vernacular approaches to Barcelona’s
explosive population growth in apartment buildings, such as the Pescadores Block
(1954), constructed for retired seamen in Barceloneta, a working-class port area of the
city. During the 1950s and 1960s, Coderch consistently developed an architectural idiom
that at its best was a subtle response to modernist “white architecture” harmonized with
local expression, climate, landscape, and culture.
Sert maintained contacts with architects and patrons in Spain, especially with those in
Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. His studio (1956) for the Surrealist painter Joan Miró,
located on the Mediterranean island of Majorca outside Palma, united the region’s
whitewashed rubble surfaces and sun-shielding perforated grilles with the formal
vocabulary of Le Corbusier and the hieroglyphic shapes of Miró.
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Spain’s isolationist tendencies dissipated during the 1950s, and interactions with
democratic nations invigorated the nation’s economy. Barcelona’s Group R (1952–58)
was founded in conjunction with the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña y Baleares’s
municipal competition to tackle the city’s constant housing problems. Josep Ma Sostres
Malaquer (1915–84) was the theoretical leader of the group and an ardent admirer of
Gaudí’s work. His own Casa Agustí (1955) in the nearby resort town of Sitges combined
a regional sensitivity to its seaside context with an understated rationalism, resulting in a
structure delicately imbricated with its nearby garden and protected by a double facade
from the sun’s penetrating heat. Group R mem-bers Oriol Bohigas Guardiola (1939–) and
Antonio Moragas Gallissà (1913–85) entered into an exchange regarding the future of
Catalonian architecture and whether it should prescribe to the rationalist or neoclassical
idiom. The group’s formal interchanges resulted in an outlook that called for Catalonian
architects to reject neoclassicism because of its associations with Francoism and instead
to promote a regionalist architecture emerging from modernism, a reinterpretation of
craftsmanship and materials, of generic urban structures, and of avant-garde spatial
configurations. Group R espoused the belief that architecture should have a social
conscience to resolve sociological problems, and the group was particularly inclined
toward the rationalist architecture of the exiled Sert, the vernacular approach of Coderch,
and the neorealism of the Milanese. The group’s most noteworthy structure, Gustavo Gili
Publishing House (1961), constructed in the interior of the Eixample for vanguard
publisher Gustavo Gili by Bassó and Gili, made use of an unadorned permeable glass
membrane wall raised on red pilotis and surmounted by a landscaped rooftop garden with
pergolas.
By the late 1950s, Francoist Spain had entered a period of sizable economic expansion
and unchecked urban development. Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao became the hubs of
this growth, and their historic centers and peripheral suburbs faced the same architectural
malaise that plagued many similar industrialized cities. Group R had grown significantly
larger and eventually was reconstituted as the so-called Barcelona School, a less formal
group of architects whose stylistic influences were markedly eclectic: modernisme, rationalism,
Brutalism, neorealism, and Neo-Expressionism. Architects Bohigas, Josep Martorell
Codina (1925–), and others came to reject modernism’s Utopian premises for a “poetic
realist” regionalism—an architecture that emphasized traditional building practices and
methods and a pragmatic knowledge of local history. The Barcelona School architects
sought to redefine and reinvigorate the role of architecture in its new socioeconomic and
technical context; the school thus became more politicized—more engaged with the
Milanese theoretical position that architecture should be a catalyst for significant social
change and that architectural practice should return to its traditional craft values. Bohigas
promoted the group’s ideas in a number of written works, including his influential
manifesto “Cap a una arquitectura realista” (1961; “Toward a Realist Architecture”).
MBM, Bohigas’s partnership with Martorell and British expatriate David Mackay (1933–
), focused on urban housing projects in the 1960s; their Casa del Pati Housing Block
(1964) and Avenida Meridiana Flats (1965) evidenced the prominent features that have
come to define the Barcelona School: tectonicity, tactile sensitivity, the so-called deep
plan, communal spaces, and sun-protective patios.
Coderch developed relationships with the international community of architects called
Team X, which had emerged from CIAM in 1956. He sought new humanistic solutions to
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urban domestic configurations in the 1960s with such projects as his Casa Uriach (1962)
and Casa Luque (1963), which introduced an especially marked sensitivity to the issue of
the privacy in their jagged plans, vertical window recesses, and prominent use of
Venetian blinds. His nonresidential Trade Office Building (1965) revealed his admiration
for Mies van der Rohe’s glass skyscraper project of 1921. From his Girasol Building
(1964) in Madrid and throughout the remainder of his life, Coderch also was engaged in
rethinking modern urban apartment projects by creating humanistic variations on the
theme, in which he sought a unified complex of distinctively autonomous apartments, a
quasi-ruralization of urban life (e.g. Calle Raset, 1974; Paseo Manuel Girona, 1975).
Nearly half a century of authoritarian rule ended with General Franco’s death in 1975,
and change became the nation’s credo. A new democratically elected government sought
the partial restoration of Spain’s historical autonomies and the creation of new public
authorities, including the Generalitat of Catalonia. Thus, the province’s distinctive culture
was revitalized, its regional language was no longer outlawed, and new museums to its
native sons were constructed. In 1976 Barcelona’s municipal officials created a new
schema for the city’s rehabilitation, the General Metropolitan Plan, in 1974 the Barcelona
School’s Ar quitectura Bis published its first issue, and from 1976 until 1980 Bohigas was chairman of
the local school of architects. MBM continued to address Barcelona’s social concerns in
such projects as their more Brutalist-inspired Thau School (1975), a collaborative-based
educational environment rooted in a more centralized and open plan of multiuse spaces.
Ricardo Bofill’s (1939–) multidisciplinary studios, Taller de Arquitectura, founded in
Barcelona in 1962 and Paris in 1971, addressed urban renewal problems with a more
fervent ideological underpinning. The visual manifestation of their aims, Walden 7
(1975) in Sant Just Desvern, named after B.F.Skinner’s behavioralist utopia, consisted of
400 multileveled flats of various sizes in 12-story concrete towers prescribing to the
Barcelona School’s deep plan and sheathed in the region’s terra-cotta tiles.
In 1981 the Generalitat named Bohigas the director of urbanism for the City of
Barcelona and in so doing solidified the effect of the Barcelona School’s new typology
for urban renewal. He used the 1976 master plan as the basis for creating regulated
densities and for identifying the civic areas most in need of revitalization, although he
questioned the earlier plan’s implementation and rejected its motorway designs. His new
strategy included the establishment of a network of communal spaces—parks, plazas, and
public facilities—threaded into the city’s densest neighborhoods, or barris. Most important,
Bohigas advocated a pragmatic solution—a balance between modernity and historical
memory—to Barcelona’s urban problems by stressing the importance of collaboration
between civil servants and consultants, by selecting specific architects to resolve specific
problems, and by emphasizing local design projects over total civic transformation. The
first so-called plaza dura (“hard” square), Alberto Viaplana (1933–) and Helio Piñón’s (1942–)
Plaza dels Països Catalans (or Plaza de la Estación de Sants, 1983), was constructed as a
flat urban area with no protective boundaries and no contextualist references to the
surrounding architecture; instead, the minimalist design acknowledged the site’s
limitations and stark immediacy. Emblematically, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona
Pavilion was painstakingly reconstructed on Montjuïc by Ignasi de Solà-Morales,
Fernando Ramos, and Cristian Cirici.
Barcelona’s selection as host to the 1992 Olympic Games focused international
attention on the city’s renovation projects, including Santiago Calatrava’s Bac de Roda
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Bridge (1987), Esteban Bonell and Fracesc Rius’s Horta Cycle Track (1984), Araka
Isozaki’s Sant Jordi Palace (1991), Norman Foster’s Coll serola Telecommunications
Tower (1992), and Richard Meier’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1995). Much of the
city’s water-front was rebuilt, Montjuïc Park was remodeled, and new roads were
developed around the periphery. Municipal government supported these sizable projects,
and a sense of optimism pervaded among many of the city’s architects, including MBM,
who designed Novia Icària (Olympic Village, 1992), an attempt to reconcile the 1859
Cerdà plan with the renovation of the city’s formerly industrial coastal belt. Named after
a 19th-century socialist group, Novia Icària became the culmination of Bohigas’s efforts
to redefine the city by balancing tradition and modernity.
