Catalonia - Art and Culture 2018

Towers of colours and a sea on a rooftop welcome visitors to to an inhabited museum that includes masterpieces of the best contemporary architecture. Contemporary architecture

© Imagen M.A.s.

© joan puig. GZ

A giant cylinder emerges from the floor, like a rocket about to take off, and rises to 144 metres. At night, the glass surface covering it lights up, producing a show of colours that warns visitors. This is the Torre Glòries (formerly Torre Agbar), one of the new icons of the city of Barcelona, built in 2005 by Jean Nouvel. Very nearby, we have the Disseny Hub Barcelona . This innova-

tive centre devoted to design (designed by the MBM studio in 2014) looks out over the Plaça de les Glòries. Its avant-garde architecture finds continuity in the buildings of the district 22@, the area where several communication technology companies have their headquarters. Beyond this, on the new section of the Diagonal which was urbanised in 2004, the city is now filled with skyscrapers. These are the last chapters of Barcelona’s long love story with architecture, the same which in the 1980s made the council decide to rebuild the German pavilion for the Internation- al Exhibition of 1929. Montjuïc recovered a ra- tionalist work by Mies van der Rohe, which with its austere and intimate beauty is still con- sidered avant-garde, just as it was a hundred years ago. The Hotel Arts (the work of Bruce Graham), communications towers built by Norman Foster on Collserola and Santiago Calatrava on Montjuïc, and large sports infrastructures such as the Sant Jordi Pavilion by Arata Isozaki, are

evidence of the city’s transformation for the Olympic Games in 1992. At the heart of the old city, the modern dark glass interior façade of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelo- na (Albert Vilaplana and Helio Piñón, 1993) re- flects the 19th-century buildings. Alongside it, the North American Richard Meier applied his reinterpretation of rationalism to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, a luminous building opened in 1995. More recently, the un- dulating ceramic rooftop of the Santa Caterina Market reminds us, like a multicoloured sea, that this is the city where the architect Enric Mi- ralles was born. However, not all of the signs of contemporary architecture are in Barcelona. In La Jonquera, by the border with France, the architects Rafael Cáceres and Philippe Pous designed the Mu- seum of Exile . The aim of this centre is to pre- serve the memory surrounding the exile of Re- publicans caused by the Civil War. Opened in 2008, its façade with different bodies hides a series of light diaphanous spaces that induce

one to serenity, thus countering the drama of the contents on display.

the interior of the Macba in barcelona

The torre glòries lit up.

and the covered

RCR: from the local to the universal

square of the teatre la lira in ripoll, the work of the RCR studio.

The avant-garde cuisine based on proximity products offered by the Les Cols restaurant in Olot found its perfect match in the architecture of the studio of Ramon Vilalta, Carme Pigem and Rafael Aranda (RCR) . RCR won the Pritzker award, the most prestigious architecture award on the planet, in 2017. It won it for works that play with glass, light, and water (Les Cols pavi- lions in Olot), that blend in with the natural land- scape (Tossols-Basil athletics stadium in Olot), or which use glass and steel to renovate a dy- namic urban complex in a street block (Sant An- toni - Joan Oliver Library in Barcelona). The team of architects also did the interior design for the Enigma restaurant, the latest adventure of Albert Adrià and his team.

© hisao suzuki. GZ

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