IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

The story of the city is the story of its parts—its neighbourhoods, its blocks, its buildings, its bricks-and-mortar, its inhabitants. From this understanding, I highlight the role of details in urban conservation theory and practice through the example of Barcelona, the first European city to acquire the label of “historic,” given by the then little-known 19th-century Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà. He is best known for his 1859 plan to expand the city of Barcelona (called the Eixample, literally, “expansion”) and invented the science of urbanism in the process. However, he was also the first to face the challenge of integrating an old city with a new expansion, and to consider the city not only as a place to live but one which contributed to its inhabitants’ health and well-being. I present the transformation of Barcelona’s historic city from Cerdà’s proposal to the present by focusing on three destruction processes, or critical ruptures, that defined the current state of the city (Industrial Revolution, Spanish Civil War, globalization), three construction types (traditional, hybrid, modern), and three intervention scales (city, building, detail). In this approach, locally crafted details by master builders such as the coronella window and the volta de maó de pla will be the focus: an assemblage of components, tangible and intangible, whose relationships continuously change and are intimately linked with the evolution and development of Barcelona’s urban fabric, playing an essential part in its conservation and maintenance. Thus, studying and preserving fine-grained details crafted by the human hand is critical to understanding the city’s making, placing, and dimensioning for its conservation. The most pressing conservation challenge for today’s historic city is to determine how the cycle of recovery and renewal can be balanced in the context of the whole, harmoniously contained in its parts—the city is in the details.