Barcelona

About this book

With the end of Francoism in 1975, a decisive moment in Spanish and European history, Barcelona becomes one of the most active sites of urban experimentation in the country and in the world. From the first town plan inspired by Oriol Bohigas and a new generation of progressive Catalan planners, passing through experiments on the active role of public space with the creation of hundreds of new squares, parks and gardens, and from the Olympic city of 1992 to the metropolis of the Forum of Cultures in 2004 and the definition of a new area, Barcelona was turned into an unprecedented model of planning and economics that could be exportedand applied in other metropolitan situations. Chiara Ingrosso's book takes the form of a surprising contemporary urban history that investigates, through a thorough analysis of the documentary sources and a series of dialogues with some of the protagonists, the social, cultural, political, architectural and economic path taken by Barcelona, attempting to take a first, significant stock of this experience. The works of great architects of international standing, from Frank Gehry to Herzog & de Meuron, along with Santiago Calatrava, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Dominique Perrault and Jean Nouvel, the researches and the projects of at least two generations of Catalan town-planners, the cultural and political role of urban design in giving form to an ideological and financial programme aimed creating a new image for the city, as well as the complex and often turbulent relationship between the new project for the city and society: these are just a few of the people and the stories that the book explores in order to convey the full complexity, richness of experience and ambiguity that the Barcelona workshop has produced over the last thirty-five years.--Publisher's note.