The Eixample, or Barcelona's Big Brother

10 Lessons from Barcelona, Manuel de Sola-Morales, p.306-308

“Residents’ and visitors’ memory of the city will always be associated with an awareness of the planned space. But it is the form of its physical grid as a mental image, the evidence of its imperturbable permanence that allows us to experience this idea and this awareness.”

During our walk throughout Barcelona’s Eixample, the one thing present during the entire time was Cerda. Every time you cut a chamfered corner, the architectural responsiveness of the buildings shows great respect and adherence towards his very specific planning for the city. In few other cities do you feel such tension between a city’s architecture and its planning; the personality of the Eixample is characterized by calculated interactions between the two. Cerda’s octagonal module becomes a very visible game for architects building around its rules, and how they are maintained or broken defines the identity of the city’s spaces. Nowhere is this more apparent than the block courtyards. Walking into these spaces revealed more rebellious interpretations of the grid than is present on its exterior. While some couryards, such as the Passatge Permanyer or Jardins de Rector Oliveras maintain a completely open and regular entry and courtyard in what closely resembles Cerda’s intentions, others such as the Casa Elizade gardens more freely interpret their purpose. In said example, the entry is fashioned into a multi-height, Neo-Classical entrance containing an art gallery that uses the space for public video installations. Yet, where the entry path ends so does the consistency, as you are pushed out from classical proportioning into a patchwork courtyard of balconies and a couple of awnings. Yet despite the schizophrenic progression of spaces from exterior to interior, the block is consistent in its language to the rest of the Eixample, and so reminds and encourages us to draw comparisons not only to Cerda’s original plan, but also to its other architectural inhabitants.