Barcelona
EMBT

EMBT daubs an innovative urban-renewal strategy with a high-spirited riot of color in Barcelona’s Santa Caterina Market

	Photo © Duccio Malagamba

By David Cohn

This characteristically uproarious design by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT) does more than transform a dour Neoclassical fresh-food market into a flying carpet of brilliant colors and agitated forms. The reconstruction of the Santa Caterina Market—and the architect’s related urban renewal plan for the streets around it—bring life and light into one of the worst slums of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.
Steps away from such well-scrubbed tourist attractions as the Picasso Museum and the Ramblas, the narrow, dim streets and tiny airless courts of the inner city are notorious for their crowding, poverty, crime, and lack of open space and services. Though the blocks are gentrifying—more rapidly in some areas than in others—they have been subject to major urban renewal plans as long ago as the 19th century and as recently as the 1990s. The area around the Santa Caterina Market is central, located just three blocks from Barcelona Cathedral, which presides over the Gothic Quarter. But people didn’t see a reason to cross the Via Laietana, a vehicle-thronged avenue that has split the quarter since it was cut through in an early-20th-century “renewal.”

Historic-center interventions in recent years, financed by European Union economic-development grants, weren’t massive slum clearances but did involve large-scale demolition. In the Raval, southwest of the Gothic Quarter, new cultural institutions such as Richard Meier’s Museum of Contemporary Art preside over large new plazas and widened streets. EMBT’s work at Santa Caterina grew out of a critique of these efforts. As the architects explain in their project brief, “Present planning methods are incapable of addressing the complexity of the historic city. Geared for immediate results, they simplify the rules of the game to an unacceptable extreme.” Tagliabue elaborated, “We tried to break with the pattern of brutal demolitions followed by rebuilding using very different typologies,” she said, referring to the raw, simplistic slab-blocks typical of public housing on the periphery. These “have nothing to do with the historic architecture of the city core, with its patios and balconies.”

The architects retained the white-painted masonry walls on three sides of the rectangular 1845 market structure, with many arched openings permeable to the surrounding streets. They brought the same granite pavers used on city streets in the neighborhood into the market interior “so that everyone understands it’s a public space,” explained Tagliabue. Since the market did not need to be so large, the architects demolished the rear wall and cut in an intimate plaza. The microbial volumes of EMBT-designed housing (for elderly residents displaced by local urban-renewal work) look as if they’ve detached themselves from the dense surrounding blocks and floated into the market itself (plan, opposite). Urbanistically, they extend narrow existing streets as light-dappled crevices, playing off the orthogonal space within which the market sits.

Inside the market, 60 vendors’ stalls mix with shops, cafés, a supermarket, a restaurant, and community services, with underground parking and a pneumatic garbage-collection system. EMBT preserved and opened to display the archaeological excavations of the medieval Convent of Santa Caterina found on the site. Overlapping the uses in the 21 million euro (U.S. $25 million) project is part of the neighborhood-revitalization calculation.

By strategically introducing new buildings as well as hybridizing and modifying the volumes of existing ones, EMBT surgically consolidated what had been the broken, irregular path of the unrealized avenue. In contrast to the urban-scale order that would have been imposed over the winding maze of medieval streets, EMBT selectively edited what existed. In this way, the idiosyncrasies of the area’s growth over the centuries remain legible in the new, larger structures of open space that had been created by earlier demolition. As the architects explain in their brief, “The first mistake is to talk about old and new. Whatever has managed to survive into the present is current, useful, and contemporary. And it permits us to move back in time in order to continue forward.”

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our February 2006 issue.
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the People Owner Foment de Ciutat Vella S.A Architect Miralles/Tagliabue – EMBT www.mirallestagliabue.com Enric Miralles, Benedetta Tagliabue, Igor Peraza Engineers Robert Brufau Consultant(s) Roof: Jose Maria Velasco Housing: Miquel Llorens General contractor COMSA Photographer Duccio Malagamba

the Products Exterior Cladding Wood structure: FRAPONT Roofing Tiles: Ceramicas Cumella Interior Finishes Floor paving: Galician granite Doors Tecfire Doth