NowBarcelona

Architecture

Architecture in Barcelona

Barcelona's turn-of-the-century architects worked in a style the city invented and nobody else adopted, and it is still the city's main subject. The Olympics and the 2004 Forum added a second layer along the water.

• Torre Glòries

  ·

  Completed 2005

  Jean Nouvel

  An office tower at the Glòries junction, built for the city water company. Jean Nouvel set a concrete shell perforated by irregular openings inside a second skin of glass slats and aluminium panels, painted in a gradient that shifts up the height. Lighting behind that outer layer turns the whole surface into a display after dark. The tower has no windows in the ordinary sense, only openings seen through a filter.

• Museu Blau

  ·

  Completed 2004

  Herzog & de Meuron

  A triangular building at the seaward end of Diagonal, built for the Forum of Cultures. Herzog & de Meuron made it an equilateral triangle a hundred and eighty metres to a side, lifted on irregular supports so the ground beneath stays open and covered. The blue exterior is rough and cut by mirrored slots that drop daylight into that undercroft. It has held the natural sciences museum since 2011, a use it was not designed for.

• Barcelona Pavilion

  ·

  Completed 1929

  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

  A national pavilion for the 1929 exposition, holding no exhibition at all. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe set a flat roof on eight cruciform steel columns and let the walls stand free of them as independent planes of onyx, marble and glass. Space runs through the plan rather than stopping at rooms. It was demolished the following year and rebuilt on the original site in 1986 from photographs and plans.

• Casa Milà

  ·

  Completed 1912

  Antoni Gaudí

  An apartment block on Passeig de Gràcia, known as La Pedrera. Antoni Gaudí carried the whole building on stone piers and iron beams instead of load-bearing walls, so every floor could be laid out freely and rearranged later. The facade is one undulating stone surface without a straight edge on the street. The roof is a field of ventilation shafts and stairwells shaped as standing figures.

• Sagrada Família

  ·

  Founded 1882

  Antoni Gaudí

  A basilica begun in 1882 and still unfinished. Antoni Gaudí took the project over a year in and replaced the Gothic Revival scheme with a structure derived from hanging chain models, which produced branching columns that need no flying buttresses. He left models and drawings rather than complete plans, and most of that was destroyed in 1936. Every generation since has had to decide what finishing it means.