Barcelona. It’s my namesake, yet until a couple months ago I’d never been to Spain. I stayed for just over three weeks, residing in an impressive flat in Barri Gotic and taking in every crack in the sidewalk with mind-numbing overwhelm.
One of the most extraordinary exhibits I visited was at the CCCB, La Centra de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Here’s the setup:
In 1859 an architect named Ildelfons Cerdà created a plan for Barcelona’s Eixample district. The Eixample, which translates as Extension in Catalan, expanded the medieval city of Barcelona after the ancient city walls were torn down. The old city center, still called Ciutat Vella (Catalan for Old City), is a mess of narrow streets with just as many dead ends as laundry lines. Instead of expanding the labyrinthine structure of the Old City, Cerdà was commissioned to make sense of it all. Today the Eixample is an eerily repeating layout of perfectly rectangular blocks containing about a quarter of Barcelona’s population. You can see it all clear as day on Google Maps, and it’s all thanks to Cerdà.
In an impressively curated presentation, the CCCB is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Cerdà’s plans with extensive drawings, models and all-around kick-ass information design. There were so many original hand-drawn maps from the 19th century, I thought my brain was going to explode.
The CCCB explains: “This exhibition sets out to reinterpret the Cerdà plan and its initial ideas, discover the underlying urbanistic and social values, and explain its more general importance as a constantly evolving part of the city.”
The exhibit presented everything from underground sewage systems to “acceptable” quadrant designs for housing blocks. Cerdà designed the entire district in equal-sized octagonal blocks, where the streets broaden at every intersection to allow greater visibility and better ventilation. He even aligned every block so it receives the same amount of sunlight.
Most historians today consider Cerdà to be the first modern urban planner. He was a genius. And maybe every urban planner is, too; I just never considered the complexity required for sucess. In this way, urban planning can be seen as a little like graphic design: If it’s successful, you don’t notice the effort. The main difference, of course, is that I design websites and pieces of paper, and Cerdà designed a city.
This is the first in our series Design Destinations, about places designers go to recharge, get inspired and have fun. Katie Barcelona is a designer who works for Michael Bierut at Pentagram New York. She hates East Coast winters but manages to enjoy good food, long walks and almost everything paper (except phone books, which she considers useless and wasteful). Katie is greatly appreciated by all of us at Felt & Wire for her contribution to our supple and useful site design.
Photo by Katie Barcelona
