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“Catalan construction” for modern architecture
The expectancy created when the city walls were demolished and the Eixample Extension Plan was drawn up materialized in midcentury with the expansion in housing and industrial construction; this came as a huge impetus for the sector and ushered in a long phase which carried on, despite vicissitudes, until the civil war 0936-1939). I Here was the recuperation of activity which had died out in the late eighteenth century as a consequence of the wars and the lethargy in which the country was sunk after the end of the war against Napoleon, lasting until a long time after the death of Fernando VII. The return to construction came at the same time as Catalan industrialization.
The early days of this return to construction coincided with the inauguration in Barcelona of the Escola de Mestres d'Obres [School of Master Builders] (859),' forming part of the new educational network set up in Spain by the Madrid School of Architecture in 1844 and inspired by the model of the Ecole Poly technique in Paris (794). The aim of the School of Master Builders was to provide official academic training for Catalan master builders and it was the basis for the Barcelona School of Architecture which opened ten years later in 1875 with the same teaching staff, headed by architects Elies Rogent, Joan Torras, Paula del Villar, Rovira i Rabassa, ete. and later reinforced with other, younger lecturers such as August Font, Lluis Domenech i Montaner, Joaquim Bassegoda, etc. The School of Master Builders lasted a decade, producing the graduates who built much of Barcelona's Eixample: the Guastavinos, Carpinell, Valles i Pujals, Macari Planella, Jeroni Granell, etc. In the professional field, master builders started to be replaced by young architects at the time of the 1888 International Exposition, though this did not become a general state of affairs until well into the new century.
The role of the School of Master Builders, followed by the School of Architecture, was basic to the future of Catalan architecture. It was these institutions which opened the door to a way of building which found its application in a product -the casa de veins [family apartment house]- which was finally modernized and adapted to the needs of a huge demand from not especially well-to-do quarters. It was really a question of imposing order, under the auspices of art -but above all of science and economy-, on what, in the late eighteenth century, was beginning to be a somewhat marginal building practice, based on brick. In the first half of the century, this practice had alreadyin the context of neo-classicism- hit upon a suitable model to make the leap from the old town, where the first experiments were carried out (Palau Reial Menor, Plaza de Sant Josep, etc.), to the new Eixample which represented the city of the future, where the limitations of the plot had been completely overcome and the bourgeois family could enjoy housing with good conditions of space, ventilation and facilities.
These houses were built out of brick, a material which allowed the maximum free space for maximum height and which, most of all, made for due control of time and cost; with a roof terrace; with a stairway (of plain brick arches) which was to include an elevator by the end of the century; first with wooden, then iron girders with tiles between them. It was a light building, of great simplicity -and above all cheap-, based on the expertise of the modern paleta, or bricklayer, the new worker in a manufacture striving towards the rationality of industry. It represented a purification of already existing techniques in brick: with the addition of cement -sporadically in mid-century and progressively after 1902 when artificial Portland cement started to be made in Catalonia-; iron, first cast -as of 1840- then laminated; and steel, after 1880. This form of building took root so strongly in Catalan architecture that it resisted any changes, even postponing the extension of reinforced concrete.
This was a way of making houses, of planning and building, which brought most Modernist architecture of the end of the century and long afterwards- into being; it also influenced the initially few monumental buildings of Catalan architecture which multiplied with the Restoration and even more under the
Mancomunitat. Today, we call this building technique traditional, but at the time it had nothing to do with tradition; it was modern. And it was also an original and genuine enough technique to earn the name -in Madrid, in particular- of «Catalan construction», an idea which was well thought of at a time of Renaixença (3) and which, to some extent, contributed to elevating this form of construction to the category of myth.
Jaume Rosell
TAFUNELL, XAVIER, "Construcció i conjuntura económica», in La formació de Eixample de Barcelona: aproximació a un fenomen urba , L'Avenç-Olimpiada Cultural, Barcelona 1990.
MONTANER, JOSEF MARIA, L'ofici de l'Arquitectura, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona 1983.
Translator's note: Nineteenth-century movement for the recovery of Catalan language and literature.
Source: Source: Exhibition Catalogue “1856-1999 Contemporary Barcelona” at CCCB. Barcelona 1996.
Project for a new city in the mid nineteenth century.
A long with Haussmann's Paris and the Vienna Ring, Barcelona's Eixample is one of the paradigms of incipient European urban planning in the nineteenth century. It was the partial materialization of a collective idea of a big city following the rationalist outline defined by
the engineer Ildefons Cerda between 1855 and 1859, and gave form to the dialectic between different models.
The desire to construct a city to contrast with the sad, hyperdensified physical reality of Barcelona -which continued corsetted within its city walls at the height of the industrial revolution- gradually started to take shape in the 1840s, in the form of a magnificent capital, the centre of a new industrial territory and a Spanish rival to London and Paris -in the oft repeated words of doctor and hygienist Pere Felip Monlau in 1841. This idea was the grounds for restructuring the city interior and systematically providing it with modern facilities -theatres, administrative buildings, civic squares and markets- thanks to the disentailment of the same time, there were demands for the demolition of the city walls to be able to occupy the extensive empty area of military occupation separating the city from its surrounding villages -Gracia, Sants and Sant Marti- which were absorbing growth once any land suitable for speculation in El Raval and La Barceloneta had been used up.
The resistance of different governments to the process of demilitarization which stood in the way of extending and renovating the city explains why the Eixample was seen as a different, alternative city to the old one. This duality was institutionalized in 1855 when the Civil Government commissioned two topographical studies; one of the outlying area, to a state engineer -Cerda- and the other of the city, to the municipal architects, in keeping with their respective competences. The cold, abstract, objective, bare topographical plan of the surrounding farmland which Cerda drew up contrasts with the variegated, meticulous, casuistic -and also objective- representation of the city by municipal architect Miquel Garriga i Roca. The two were complementary and vital for the joint project, while centring their authors' attention on one of the aspects of urban transformation the Eixample or reform-, starting out on a dual project path which turned out to be conflictive.
In the same year Cerda presented a preliminary project for the future city on the outlying land; it was brought before the government with a series of conditions to be met by the new Eixample, prepared by a broad-based commission set up by Barcelona City Council.
In view of the delays caused by the change of government and doubts as to the striking of the military fortified city, and given the general impatience of the people of Barcelona, the City Council commissioned Garriga i Roca to draw up a preliminary project. Garriga i Roca, meanwhile, was studying a project for reform and extension to integrate the contradictory criteria of Cerda and the commission and to ensure a harmonious combination of controllable growth and planned transformation of the city. A new advisory commission was also set up to stipulate the economic and legal conditions in addition to the outline; it presented its conclusions at the same time as those of Cerda's definitive plan, which now incorporated the reform of the old town and was approved by the government without waiting for the results of the competition which the City Council had so hastily organized.
The competition was won by Antoni Rovira i Trias with a project which faithfully rendered the desire to create a monumental centre around what today is Pla\;a de Catalunya, separating districts with different functions into zones and creating a clear hierarchy of the city's urban space to be able to suitably control the growth of its parts starting with the old town, presupposing its reform as outlined in Garriga i Roca's project, which was being processed at the Council.
Rovira openly followed the theory being applied by the French in the restructuring of Paris; Cerda's project, meanwhile, under the title Urbanization theory applied to the city of Barcelona, was also openly polemical with its proposal of an isotropic, egalitarian, anti-hierarchical grid, the idea behind which was to obtain as much surface area as possible to bring down the price of rents. It was a design for a new, functional port city, intentionally avoiding the attributes of capitality, in keeping with what state governments would find acceptable and disregarding the old town, cutting roads through it to join the Eixample with the port, the only place it considered to be central. The Diagonal was an addition to the preliminary plan which he had presented four years previously; this meant that three of the four main roads he proposed intersected at the Pla\;a de les Glories, thus involuntarily turning it into what many were scandalized to consider a future, distant urban centre.
The government passed Cerda's outline in 1860, but neither the economic conditions nor the ordinances -which the Plan's author considered vital- had the same good fortune, as they were not considered to be attainable. In fact they gradually took shape over the following decades in quite different fashion to the initial plans of Cerda who, for his part, took an active part in seeking realistic alternatives.
In 1860 a modification to Passeig de Gracia was passed, introducing La Rambla and Plaza de Catalunya and fixing the definitive outline which the city was to follow for more than a century as a guideline for growth. The reform, conversely, embarked on an erratic, complex process which has lasted until the present day. In both cases, the efforts of successive generations were able to -indeed, had to- concentrate on reinterpreting and shaping this “unlimited” outline due to the rigorousness, the precision and indifference with which it had been approached.
Ferran Segarra
Source: Exhibition Catalogue “1856-1999 Contemporary Barcelona” at CCCB. Barcelona 1996.