Barcelona - Eixample

The district of Eixample (the name means "extension") extends in an arc round the old part of the city out as far as the foothills of Tibidabo and Carmel. It is distinguished by a right-angled street network which passes through the characteristic "mansanas" (dwelling blocks) with their diagonal intersections.

History

Until the mid-19th C. the city boundaries were the limits of what was the still partially walled old quarter, with undeveloped land extending out to what were then the neighboring localities. With the repeal of the Catalans' special privileges by Philip V (1714) and the loss of its Mediterranean pre-eminence Barcelona had entered a phase of economic decline which excluded any possibility of growth. This changed with the reawakening of the Catalan national consciousness, which in 1814 led to the "Renaixença" (renaissance) when, in the wake of the Romantic movement and influenced by the Wars of Liberation of the time, there was a reawareness emerging in regions all over Europe of their history and culture. At the same time the growth of industry initiatedd a new era of upper- class prosperity, which did not leave the city's planning unaffected. In 1860 the old city walls of Barcelona were torn down and the built-up areas expanded at an incredible rate partly as a result of the incorporation of several neighboring places.

Pla Cerdà

When the extension of the city was beginning there was controversy among various town-planners concerning the best possible contemporary, and at the same time most sensible, design. Finally two alternatives remained: a plan by the architect Antoni Rovira i Trias, based on a network of streets radiating from the Old Town, and a checkerboard plan by Ildefons Cerdà. At first the technical commission responsible decided on Rovira's project, but by a royal decree of May 31 1860 the "Pla Cerdà" was adopted.

The great achievement of the city planners lay in the fact that right from the start they were able to resist untrammelled new development and to follow a plan in the true sense of the word. Their aim was to create a large-scale urban structure permeated by light and air. The man who masterminded and initiated the new developments was the engineer Ildefons Cerdà, who was responsible for their underlying concept. The chessboard-patterned street network with its, even by today's standards, generously proportioned roads and its large (100m/382ft x 100m/382ft) blocks of buildings, made it possible to reach any destination within the new city without any loss of time. Thus it was that two magnificent boulevards were needed to intersect the area diagonally: the Avinguda de la Diagonal and the Avinguda de la Meridiana (running at 2°10' longitude parallel to the Greenwich Meridian), their point of intersection forming the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. Whilst the Diagonal has been almost completely built through from the Zona Universitària in the west almost as far as the coast in the east, the Meridiana is without its final stretch between Glòries Catalanes and Ciutadella.

The original lithograph of the design for the city extension is on display in the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat.

Overall view

The extension of the city into the Eixample district coincided with the development of modernisme. This style of art and architecture, associated above all with Barcelona, embraces every variation from late Historicism through to Art Nouveau and does so without undergoing the complete cultural break that, for instance occurred in Germany between the period of rapid industrial expansion and the later period. The new city area particularly attracted circles of well-off upper-class people, and architects like Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, with their magnificent buildings, conferred on the Eixample its unmistakable charm. Also relevant is the fact that Spain was neutral in both world wars, while the Civil War (1936-39) was far from being able to inflict the same kind of damage as the bombing campaigns to which other Europeans countries were subjected from 1939 to 1945.

Most of the representative buildings of the Modernist period are to be found in the Quadrat d'Or, the area on either side of the Passeig de Gràcia between the Plaça de Catalunya and the Avinguda de la Diagonal. The most important places will be found in the index at the end of this book.