The pursuit of pleasure by the most efficient available means | the urbanism of Benidorm, Spain Rafael Gomez-Moriana
b enidorm is a city in southeastern Spain with an urban morphol- ogy that is highly unusual for Europe: it is a city of point towers. From a distance, it resembles an American downtown or a new Asian city, with hundreds of tall, slender buildings wedged between arid, semi- desert hills and sparkling sea. From the A-7 highway, which runs the entire length of the highly built-up Mediterranean coast of Spain from the French border to the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, the apparition of Benidorm manages to produce surprise and confu- sion even after passing through much larger cities such as Barcelona and Valencia. Benidorm began to develop its urbanism of point towers in the 1960s, when it was transformed from a small fishing village into a major holiday destination for northern Europeans, and, significantly, when
the modernist high-rise apartment ‘slab’ was still de rigueur world- wide among architects, planners and mayors. Seen in this historical context, Benidorm prognosticates the demise of the modernist slab and the current growth of the point tower as the preferred form of high-rise residential construction. In the North American city—the very birthplace of the skyscrap- er—towers have generally contained office space; high-rise residential buildings more typically assume the form of slabs. It is only relatively recently that the residential point tower has become a commonplace in cities such as Toronto or Vancouver. But the emergence of point-tower housing has been even slower in Europe, where high-rise construction is culturally abhorred and where towers have historically been privi- leged, singular urban landmarks such as church steeples, defensive
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architecture and land
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