JOIN USNot so long ago, travellers might have stopped in the Glòries area of Barcelona only if they were stuck in traffic. Three major roads leading in and out of this Spanish city – Avenida Diagonal, Avenida Meridiana and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes – converged here at an elevated roundabout, where cars often came to a standstill.
But lately this northeastern axis of the Catalan capital – situated in the Sant Martí district, bordering Eixample – is becoming a place to go to, not just through, especially for those interested in design. The roundabout has been torn down as part of a roadway reconfiguration, making the area more walkable. And some of the city’s most exciting public spaces have sprung up nearby, including a popular flea market under a modernist metal roof and, opening last December, the Barcelona Design Museum.
Joining hands to change a cityIldefons Cerda, the engineer who drew up the 1859 plan for the expansion of Barcelona, envisioned his Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes as a new town centre. Instead, Glories, as it’s commonly called, became the aforementioned traffic snarl, a no man’s land at the top point of a triangular swath stretching down to the Mediterranean, encompassing Poblenou, a longtime manufacturing zone that declined in the 20th Century.
Redevelopment efforts before the 1992 Olympics led to a rebranding of Poblenou as the “22@” district, Barcelona’s mini-Silicon Valley. In recent years, artists, architects and designers have joined technology companies here, and galleries and furniture showrooms have opened amid auto repair shops, abandoned lots and nondescript low-rise housing blocks.
With a map from the Poblenou Urban District – pick one up at the nonprofit group’s office on Calle Pujades – you can search out, say, BD (for Barcelona Design), a showroom featuring the curvy chairs that Antoni Gaudi created for his famous modernista buildings, or Noak Room, specialising in midcentury Scandinavian wares. At L’estoc, founded to employ people with intellectual disabilities, you can peruse furniture made from salvaged shutters and doors while the sander whines in the adjoining workshop.
If you’re in town the first weekend of the month, head for the new pop-up market at Palo Alto, an enclave of architects and designers in a cluster of old ivy-covered factory buildings. Can Framis, a museum of contemporary art, incorporated the ruins of a wool mill in its campus.
Newer, more grandly scaled buildings loom around the Glòries intersection, which is still a construction site, but will become a park by 2018, according to city projections. There’s the colourful, rocket-shaped Agbar Tower, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and built for the local water company, for example, and the Parthenon-inspired National Theater of Catalonia.
Aficionados of lowbrow aesthetics are also heading to Glòries, thanks to the arresting Encants Barcelona, the new home for the area’s historic flea market – a ramped space, open on the sides, with slender columns supporting an angular reflective metal canopy. Since the market moved here in 2013, it’s been drawing 1,20,000 antiques- and junk-seekers a week to early morning auctions and the stalls that open directly after the last lot has sold.
Ironically, the building housing the Barcelona Design Museum – a squat, zinc-clad structure with front and rear cantilevers – hasn’t exactly been celebrated for its exterior form. Some have taken to calling it “the Stapler.”
The museum, which unites collections of Catalan decorative arts, graphics, ceramics, textiles and fashion thatpreviously had been scattered throughout the city, was originally to be the building’s sole occupant. But in an effort to make use of its vast interior spaces – and lure people to what is still considered an off-the-beaten-path area – municipal
leaders also moved the city’s major design organisations here and named the enterprise Design Hub Barcelona (DHUB).
Today, while design professionals show up for events in the building, museum-goers make their way through exhibits that sprawl on four floors, displaying everything from corsets to cruets. The museum, which charges a five-euro ($5.35) general admission fee, has already drawn about 2,04,000 visitors.
The institution is already helping attract traffic – foot traffic – to the Glòries area. “In the future, Glòries will be a place not for cars, but for people,” said Isabel Roig, executive director of Barcelona Design Center, a trade group and one of DHUB’s new tenants.