The City Homage To BARCELONA

(3 of 5)
The second boom occurred at the height of Barcelona's industrial prosperity and misery, between 1860 and 1910. Its main frame, the huge grid of chocolate- square blocks that stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Collserola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place to northern Europe in Spain. It received the ideas of the French Enlightenment, and later those of socialists and anarchists; its music, literature and painting were permeated by French Symbolism, by Wagner and Nietzsche, by Impressionism.

Barcelona was the place where Picasso studied, where Salvador Dali grew up, and out of whose deeply conservative traditions of family and rural life Joan Miro, Catalunya's greatest painter since the 14th century, was able to fashion an art of the most radical poetry. And the best buildings constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled his savagely ironic, picaresque novel of fin-de-siecle Barcelona.

The civic style, if one can so compress it, was more than just a Spanish mutation of Art Nouveau, which the Catalans called modernisme. It was obsessed with the meaning of local nationality and the eternal pressure of the past. It was full of myth, decoration, narrative, metaphor: a speaking architecture, overrich for some purist tastes but of interest to anyone today who wants to see how social and historical meanings are embodied in new building.

Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of their grandfathers had been artisans or colonial hustlers. There was a lot of pent- up vigor and ambition itching to glorify itself.

So they built copiously through the three decades of what Catalans still call their Renaissance. La Renaixenca was a powerful, diffuse movement. It revolved obsessively around the issue of Catalan independence. It embraced politics, social theory, poetry, architecture. It was both progressive and intensely nostalgic. It believed in the future; it also drew its confidence from invoking the vanished era of the Catalan counts, the troubadours, the Cistercian monasteries.