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Barcelona: Arena of Vision
| Article
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18750 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
1,936 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Powell
Kenneth Powell is an architecture writer for the London Daily
Telegraph. |
Barcelona is far more than just the second city of Spain, a country emerging from relative poverty and obscurity to rank as one of the most dynamic economic and cultural forces in the new Europe. It is both a great international trading city, a Mediterranean metropolis looking outward to the sea and the ocean beyond, and an intensely regional center, the capital of fiercely independent Catalonia. In this duality lies the essence of its history and the key to its present. As European cities like London, Paris, Malian, Frankfurt, Lyons, and Berlin line up in the stakes for dominance in the increasingly unified Europe of the twenty-first century--when cities may count for more than nations, as they did five hundred years ago--Barcelona seems likely to become one of the winners. There is a vision and energy in the place, an unwillingness to depend on past glories and a determination to excel in every area of human activity.
Next year Barcelona will host the Olympic Games. In itself, this is an achievement, since there is intense international rivalry for the honor. Yet the Olympics will soon be over. Does the honor justify the expenditure of huge sums of money--contributed by the city, the Catalonian regional government, and the national government in Madrid--and the disruption caused by hundreds of thousands of visitors, following on from years of noise and confusion when areas of the city have been all but rebuilt?
The city fathers of Barcelona are convinced that the Olympics will pay dividends over the next few decades. They have used the Games as the occasion for a major public building program designed to provide the city with resources it formerly lacked. Around and beyond the Games, in fact, Barcelona is the scene of an explosion of new architecture, public and private, on a scale paralleled in contemporary Europe only in Paris and London. New buildings of quality are part of a coordinated campaign to restructure much of Barcelona. It is hard not to be impressed.
The old city of Barcelona, which remains largely intact to this day, was one of the great urban centers of medieval Europe--Barcelona's preeminence is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. It was a mercantile city, but in the nineteenth-century industry took root there, fueling further growth. Initially the expansion of the city was impeded by its medieval walls, which until this point had remained a military necessity. In 1854, however, the city resolved to allow the demolition of the walls and subsequently areas of land beyond, owned by the military, were put up for sale. An unplanned sprawl, the product of unchecked speculation, could have been the
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