Cerda: 150 Years of Modernity

(Hardback, English)

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This book is a tribute to the first modern urban planner and his product: the Eixample, which is today the thriving and undisputed center of the Barcelona metropolitan area. The city of Barcelona as constructed over the last 150 years on the strength of Ildefons Cerda 's 1859 'Project for the Reform and Expansion' bears living witness to the modernity of a way of thinking and making the city. An appreciaton of the values of the Eixample that have taken shape in the last century and a half affords illuminating insights into what it means to plan, design and build a city. The chapter structure is devoted to an orderly analysis in the first instance of the elements that articulate the construction of the Eixample -- the residential fabric, the grid, the street, the chamfered corner and the sewers -- and then of the city blocks and the various configurations associated with housing, industry, amenities and open spaces. The book intentionally focuses on the Eixample as a whole -- what we know as the Cerda Eixample -- instead of confining itself to the more central Eixample traditionally associated with Modernista architecture.

Author Bio

Frances Magrinya is a civil engineer and urbanism's PhD from the University Paris l-Sorbonne, currently urbanism professor at the Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya. Fernando Marza is an architect; he was the deputy of the Spanish Pavilion at 2010 Venecia's Biennale and, currently, is a professor at the ETSAV.