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certain areas provide an interesting contrast with the
modernista
flourishes over
the way, particularly the urban park projects close to Barcelona Sants train
station, notably the Parc Joan Miró.
As the Eixample covers a very large area, you won’t be able to see everything
described below as part of a single outing – all the relevant public transport
details are given in the text. For a map and guide showing all the city’s
modernista
sights, and for other benefits, the
Ruta del Modernisme
package might be
of interest, while the Barcelona Card or the Articket also offer useful discounts
(see p.31).
Dreta de l’Eixample
It’s the right-hand side of the Eixample – the so-called
Dreta de l’Eixample
– that has the bulk of the city’s show-stopping
modernista
buildings. Most are
contained within the triangle formed by the Passeig de Gràcia, Avinguda
Diagonal and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, and all are within a few
blocks of each other. The stand-out sights are Gaudí’s
La Pedrera
apartment
building, as well as the so-called
Mansana de la Discòrdia
, or “Block of
Discord”, which gets its name because the three adjacent houses, casas Lleó
Morera, Amatller and Batlló – built within a decade of each other by three
different architects – show off wildly varying manifestations of the
modernista
style and spirit. Gaudí’s first apartment building, the Casa Calvet, is also in the
Dreta, along with various art galleries and museums, a great neighbourhood
market and several interesting restored public spaces.
The main access is along the wide
Passeig de Gràcia
, which runs northwest
from Plaça de Catalunya as far as the southern reaches of Gràcia. Laid out in its
present form in 1827, it’s a splendid, showy avenue, bisected by the other two
main city boulevards, the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes and Avinguda
Design a city . . . designer city
When it came to building an entire new town in the nineteenth century, Barcelona
then, as now, didn’t do things by halves. The city authorities championed a fan-
shaped plan by popular municipal architect
Antoni Rovira i Trias
, whose design
radiated out from the existing shape of the old town. (His statue, in Gràcia’s Plaça
Rovira i Trias, sits on a bench with his Eixample plan set in the ground beneath him.)
However, much to local chagrin, Rovira’s elegant if conventional plan was passed
over by the Spanish government in favour of a revolutionary blueprint drawn up by
utopian engineer and urban planner
Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer
. This was defiantly
modern in style and scale – a grid-shaped new town marching off to the north,
intersected by broad avenues cut on the diagonal. Districts would be divided into
blocks, with buildings limited in height, and central gardens, schools, markets,
hospitals and other services provided for the inhabitants. Space and light were part
of the very fabric of the design, with Cerdà’s characteristic wide streets and shaved
corners of the blocks surviving today. However, he eventually saw most of his more
radical social proposals ignored, as the Eixample rapidly became a fashionable area
in which to live and speculators developed buildings on the proposed open spaces.
Even today though, the underlying fabric of Cerdà’s plan is always evident, while in
certain quiet corners and gardens the original emphasis on social community within
grand design lives on.
THE EIXAMPLE
|
Dreta de l’Eixample