the rise and fall of barcelona from architectural tourism to touristic architecture rafael gómez-moriana
spectacle accomodation opportunism protest
Gaudí’s heyday was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when industry represented progress, and Barcelona proudly referred to itself as ‘the Manchester of the south’. The city held two international expositions during that period, one in 1888 and another in 1929, mainly to promote the latest industrial and architectural trends to the business and political elite. Mass tourism was not a thing in Spain until the 1960s, and then it was mainly of the sun, surf and sangría kind; not urban tourism. The elimination of trade barriers by Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s and the subsequent rise of globalisation finally shut down many of Barcelona’s factories, bringing to an end its industrial century. It was time to implement another economic activity. Today Barcelona is one of the most recognisable urban brands in the world, attracting over 12 million visitors annually. Whenever visiting tourists are asked in surveys what attracted them to Barcelona, 90% of respondents answer ‘the city’s architecture’, by which they really mean the work of Antoni Gaudí and his contemporaries. The rising popularity of Postmodern architecture in the 1980s led to the rediscovery of Gaudí. As a glimpse into any Barcelona souvenir shop will prove, Gaudí is the city’s main attraction, right up there with FC Barcelona. His exuberant buildings, which please crowds from every corner of the globe, made Barcelona into a busy destination for architectural tourism. Gaudí’s buildings, many of them residential, had to be restored and adapted for reuse as museum quality tourist attractions, a lengthy process that began in the late 1980s. Since then, visitor numbers to Gaudí sites have increased exponentially year after year. Casa Milà , the last project to be completed by Gaudí in his lifetime ( Sagrada Família is still incomplete), was transformed from a soot-covered apartment building with neon signs advertising a ground- floor shopping arcade into a museum with prestige office space to let. Bachelor pads that had been built in the attic in the 1960s by the architect Francisco Juan Barba Corsini were ripped out as part of the restoration effort; the attic now transformed into an exhibition space of models and furniture by Gaudí. Buildings by Modernista architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch were also renovated and transformed, and the German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich for the 1929 International Exposition was entirely reconstructed, opening in 1986.
Has anyone ever noticed how often the word visitor is used by architecture students and practitioners when referring to the human subject of a design project? As in: “the visitor enters the building here…” or “this is a space where the visitors...” It is of course not at all inappropriate to use visitor when the project in question is a museum, but the V -word is also used frequently when discussing residential projects. It’s as if the primary task of architecture were to impress onlookers. Why is it that, in our collective unconscious, the visitor is today’s ideal subject of architecture? Is the impermanence and transitoriness of the Deleuzian nomad fundamentally preferable to the rootedness of the Heideggerian dweller when it comes to architecture? To begin with, human travel of some sort or other is always necessary when interacting with buildings; their immobility requires us to travel to them. And when we travel to unfamiliar territory, we tend to be much more perceptive to our surroundings than when we are in our everyday environment, which tends to be taken for granted. Travel thus ultimately makes us much more sensitive to architecture, an art that values exceptionality and extraordinariness. As travellers, moreover, we inhabit space transitorily and impermanently, which liberates architecture from the pesky and often mundane demands of regular, everyday users. It would certainly seem, then, that architecture and tourists are ideally suited for one another; a marriage made in heaven. What could possibly go wrong? This must have been what the political leaders of Barcelona were thinking during the late 1970s and 80s, when democracy was returning to Spain and Barceloneses wanted nothing more than to turn a proverbial page after four decades of repressive dictatorial rule by General Franco. La Barcelona grisa (grey Barcelona as it was referred to then) needed to be transformed into something radically bright and new, and what better means to achieve this than hosting an Olympic Games to kick-start a metropolitan transformation from grimy industrial port to chic and glam tourist destination? Up to the 1980s, Barcelona was still an industrial city. Factories and smokestacks were everywhere, the city was covered in soot, and shantytowns occupied the city’s beaches and steep hillsides. The only tourists to be seen in the city before the 1992 Olympics were hippie backpackers and camera-clad Japanese aficionados of Gaudí, an architect who had fallen into relative obscurity since the rise of rationalist modernism.
facing page, clockwise from top left: Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà rooftop chimneys. 1912 Antoni Gaudí, Sagrada Familia. 1882-present Jean Nouvel, Glòries Tower . 2005 Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà. 1906-1912, cleaned in 1990
4 on site review 46 :: travel
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