JOIN USBarcelona is an art lover’s paradise, exclaims Janardhan Roye, coming face to face with the stunning style of art and architecture the city is home to.
In the north-east of Iberia, on the Mediterranean Sea, nestles a city that is so multi-culturally rich in art and architecture that few megacities of today come close to it. But then Barcelona has had a 2,000-year head start.
The sea-side location brims with age-old Roman ruins, Gothic structures, medieval palaces and churches. Alongside them is the flamboyant Catalan art nouveau with its stunning creations by Gaudi, Domenech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafelch. To complete the picture, the cityscape has dazzling, neat, geometrically precise urban blocks with arty sculptures and other restful sights.
The modern upgradation got a leg up with the 25th Olympiad Stadium and Village. A new wave of art and architecture, and indeed a series of public-private engineered logistics, sports, cultural, social and civic infrastructures took the city to another contemporary level. Now Barcelona is awash with breathtakingly fresh, compellingly futuristic and environmentally friendly designs.
To understand these sweeping changes in a chronological order, a good starting point is the Barrio, the old walled city. Here, remnants of its days as a Roman colony have been carefully preserved.
Over time, another layer covered the town with medieval gems of art and architecture, winding narrow cobble-stoned alleys with well-maintained 13th-14th century homes of noble families, art galleries and museums, small local wet markets, taverns and kiosks.
The monuments, streetside sculptures and ornamentation such as the elegant overhead archway on Carrer del Bisbe vividly convey life in the Renaissance. And presiding grandly over this medieval ‘open-air-museum’ is the imposing Cathedral of Barcelona.
This high church and seat of the archbishop interestingly maintains centuries-old tradition. The cloister resounds with the sounds of 13 white geese happily going about their business in a medieval pond.
In the Barrio, just off the Ramblas, Placa Reial and Palau de la Música Catalana stand out from the rest of somber, ordered surroundings.
For sure, these are ‘weird but beautiful’ structures. The art has wavy lines and curves instead of the conventional straight line. There are keenly worked ornamentation — flowers, plants, animals and mythology that decorate the space in vibrant, natural colours. Similar icons, symbolism and approach mark the Palau Guell and other structures in Barcelona.
This unique design approach received much support in the area beyond the old walled city where the well-heeled, rich set up home in the late 1800s. In this well-ordered urban grid — the Eixample district, the idea of a strong, fiercely Catalan and independent identity — separate from Castilian Spain was embraced by artists, architects, literary figures and intellectuals.
With the funding, creative juices flowed uninhibitedly!
Known as Moderisme, it was kicked off by architect Lluis Domenach I Montaner (1850-1923). His 1888 World Fair’s restaurant, Castle of the Three Dragons, signalled the beginning of the art and architecture revolution.
The building had crenellated walls, a medieval get-up with outsized Roman windows and Moorish arches and brick walls encrusted generously with ceramic inlays. In time, this eclectic modernist style was enhanced with up-to-the-minute engineering and construction techniques.
The work shocked the establishment but received wide public attention first in Barcelona, and later, all over Spain. But it took another man, Montaner’s pupil, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), to take this stunning style of art and architecture to worldwide acclaim. Today, much of these works are UNESCO heritage sites.
Gaudi ‘overcame the prevailing historical styles of eclecticism of the 19th century and developed his own aesthetic with its own distinctive but difficult to classify style’. The Palau Güell which resembles a Venetian palace was a good early representation of his work.
The town house, Casa Batllo, with its unusual roof in the form of the back of a dragon representing the legend of St. George, Casa Mila with its chimney stacks that look like they are out of Star Wars, and other work — Parc Gruell, Hospital de Santa Creu i de Sant Pau and the majestic, work-in-progress Sagrada Familia church — are ‘beautiful but curious symbols’ of the Catalan art nouveau.
But Barcelona, ever the restless, organic city, moves on with startling new art and architecture that is vibrant, exuberantly futuristic and environmentally sensitive.
Take Sir Norman Foster’s Camp Nou.
This is the largest soccer stadium in Europe and home to FC Barcelona. When inaugurated by Pope John Paul II, it was said that 1,20,000 seats could be evacuated within five minutes. It is the city’s first major sports-linked city modernisation and expansion project.
Another spectacular milestone in Barcelona’s urban transformation, thanks to the 1992 Olympics, is the ‘top-quality’ infrastructure — world class ring roads and bridges, expanded railway network and high-speed trains, state-of-the-art telecommunication facilities, and a slew of bold, imaginative buildings.
The new art and architecture marvels include the Miralles-Tagliabue designed Gas Natural Tower, an unusual and innovative building that dominates the Barceloneta waterfront; Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, an example of modern architecture embedding ‘historical value’ materials such as travertine, marble; Herzog-de Meuron’s triangular-faced Museu Blau de les Ciencies Naturals; Richard Meier Museum of Contemporary Art; Santiago Calatrava Montjuïc Telecommunication Tower, a sculpture, ‘hewn from a single piece of marble’ to depict an athlete with the Olympic Flame in hand, pays tribute to Gaudi by using the architect’s mosaic technique, Trencadis, at the tower’s base to give it the Moderisme touch.
An outstanding example of contemporary high design is the Torre Agbar. This 38-storey tower is visible from most parts of the city. Jean Nouvel’s design, well before Norman Foster’s ‘gherkin’ in London, was inspired by the organic forms of Gaudi’s buildings, the hills of the Montserrat and the Mediterranean Sea.
Unique to this building is the three layers of ‘skin’ — one of aluminium in different colours of high gloss, another of glass, and a third, of coloured windows that constantly change appearance. Depending on the incidence of daylight, the tower changes colours to serve as sunscreen. Presently, the Torre Agbar is the highest building in Barcelona. In the meanwhile, the authorities are denying permission for buildings that are taller than the Gaudi masterpiece.
Topping the list for the ‘most innovative, and most futuristic’ building is the award-winning Cloud 9’s Media-ICT building. This incredible cube-shaped high-rise inflates or deflates to regulate the interior climate and light! Wrapped in translucent, temperature-controlling ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene filters, the building incorporates a host of sustainability and green credentials — rainwater harvesting, use of non-potable water for plumbing and cooling, minimal carbon emission, harnessing sunlight, roof-top garden.
Interestingly too, the segmented organic triangular architecture is in sync with nature-inspired features that are the hallmark of Moderisme.
As such, in the land of Gaudi, Montaner and Cadafelch, such futuristic art and architecture exuberantly take forward Moderisme, imbuing it with contemporary relevance even as they please the eye with their aesthetics.