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Forum 2004, Now More Than Ever.

The attacks on September 11th in the United States have suddenly brought forth a new dimension to the idea of a globalized world. The debate between so-called globalizers and anti-globalizers, which has not yet solidified into real proposals and clear-cut alternatives, has at once taken on a different meaning as a result of a terrorist threat whose target is a reality as vast as the western world and its traditional as well as occasional allies. It seems as though nothing can be the way it was before. The suicide attacks in New York and Washington have awoken such multi-ethnic and plural solidarities that any attempt to consider the planet's central problems from a perspective centred on what has been called the clash of civilizations is unthinkable. In any case, is peaceful, stable coexistence between cultures based on different beliefs possible ? Is it possible to set up a culture of peace in a world which displays so many serious economic inequalities and utterly different degrees of development ?
The "Fòrum Universal de les Cultures" (Universal Culture Forum) tries to put these questions at the centre of its debates. As a result of the international crisis of the last few months, a Forum intended to foster social dialogue and reflection on the new alliances and the relation between cultures and the road to peace is now made more necessary than ever. These new circumstances strongly call for something to be done in Barcelona through its "Forum 2004" project, and it is necessary to work hard not to disappoint these expectations.
Even though much criticism has been addressed to the Forum, much of it very reasonable and well thought out, we would like to stress that the problems which have plagued the Forum were not of a political nature but had to do with management. The institutional agreement - involving the Spanish State, the Catalan Generalitat government and the Barcelona City Council - is running smoothly and it is mainly the management that needs to be improved. With the momentum given to the Forum in these last weeks, the machinery has been put into motion, malfunctions which had caused problems in the past have been corrected, and the programme of events will be ready at the end of the year.
It is important, however, not to forget that the Forum is a state-of-the-art event. Which is to say that Barcelona is inventing an event which is without precedents. And here lies the unique charm of the Forum - one of its most evident difficulties but, at the same time, its most interesting and exciting challenge -. Barcelona has the oppportunity to create a model for future celebrations and universal forums that is already awakening the attention of other cities around the world that aspire to organize future editions of the Universal Culture Forum with the aim of making it a regular, "normalized" international event.
Although the programme of events still must specify details and contents, we already know that the Forum will have three different, clearly defined fields of action. Reflection - which will materialize into debates, meetings and interactive activities -, participation - which will manifest itself in a multidisciplinary festive gathering open to everyone -, and experimental activities - which will take the form of exhibitions, displays and performances -, all of them centred around the ideas of peace, sustainability and multicultural interaction. On the other hand, the Forum will use its main stage, stretched over the whole Besós area, to make an important contribution in the application of the criteria of sustainibility that an urban development in the service of its citizens ought to develop. B.MM

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THE OBSERVATORY.
A quite acceptable growth rate.
by Xavier Güell,
Managing editor of "Barcelona Economia".

Follow-up analyses of the evolution of the diverse economic activity indicators during the first half of 2001 show that the Barcelona Area entered the summer boasting an economic position which, generally speaking, proved to be much more favourable that it could have been expected to be in view of the notable loss of momentum that most national economies in neighbouring countries - as well as all major economic powers worldwide - have been undergoing from the second half of 2000 on.
(...) Barcelona's growth was maintained at a level of about 3,5 per cent, a figure higher than those noted in the rest of Catalonia and in keeping with the average annual growth rate over the last seven years. What basically accounts for this differential (...) is the dynamism steadily displayed by the sector of services within the non-residential real-estate business and building industry in the central sections of the city. (...)

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Let's dethrone "King Automobile".
by José Martí Gómez

In the British town where the "French lieutenant's woman" was filmed, residents were at first thrilled to bits about the sudden arrival of thousands of automobiles full of people who wanted to have a close-up view of the rocks on which the heroine of the film had been seen standing, unflaggingly waiting for the lieutenant's return. However, a few months later, the town's people were literally fed up with the French lieutenant, his wretched lover and all those visitors who were dirtying their streets and polluting the air while spending little more than four miserable pounds. So the Town Council decided to impose a tax on all motorized vehicles that entered the municipality.
The Mayor of London is currently considering taking similar measures. He intends to charge car drivers five pounds a day for moving through the city's central area. V. Oppenheimer, the correspondent of the "El Pais" newspaper in London, wrote that Mayor Ken Livingstone, nicknamed "Red", intends the toll to become effective in January 2003. Equivalent preparatory steps are being taken in Bristol, Leicester and Edinburgh, while local authorities in Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, Cambridge and Birmingham are quite seriously considering the possibility of following in their London counterparts' footsteps.
But what was that initiative initially inspired by ? It has its origins in the electronic devices that were installed years ago in Singapore, a city where the main thoroughfares leading to downtown areas are equipped with digital cameras fixed to overhead supports. Each car has its own magnetic strip card, a kind of electronically controlled account which is automatically debited every time the car passes by a control point. (...)
It does not really matter what we use - magnetic strip cards, artificial frontier posts or urban policemen' writing pads -, but the fact is that something has to be done to prevent the streets of our cities - large, medium-sized or small ones alike - from becoming overrun with motorized vehicles. (...)
But how should the streets of our cities look like in the future? While I was staying in London, I interviewed Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, two architects who are held in very high esteem by the City Council of Barcelona. Their views on the subject coincided : "In the future, our main causes for concern will have to do with pollution and this is directly connected with the need to pursue a truly efficient public transportation policy, with an effort to minimize the detrimental impact of traffic, with the creation of safe areas within which people might feel free to take walks or go to work by bicycle, and with finding a way to establish an appropriate intermixture of various activities within the community". (...)
Foster and Rogers also insisted that we would succeed in making cities of the future truly inhabitable only through efforts to minimize the use of private transport and maximize the use of public transport. If motorized vehicles continue to invade and appropriate our cities, communities will end up disintegrating and the ensuing exodus of residents towards the outer peripheral areas of cities will entail the creation of suburbs modelled on the North American "suburbia", whereas the distinctive lifestyle that has always prevailed in Europe is based on the existence of densely populated communities.
However, the latest developments seem to indicate that the North American way of life is gradually gaining ground, at least judging from the growing number of semi-detached houses - which are but the poor relations of the opulent-looking mansions of American suburbia - and from the fact that cars are steadily invading our streets. In this respect, during a debate conducted by the "Consell de Cent" Association, Viçens Villatoro recently stated that, in view of the politicians' surrender, the automobile had already won the battle.
Let's hope that it is not actually so and that we shall soon find ways to put the automobile in its place, forcefully and clearly outlining the limits beyond which it cannot and should not go. (...)

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The last of the vegetable gardeners of the Baix Llobregat
by Gabriel Pernau

Cult, culture, agriculture, cultivation, cultivated ... Cultivation of the land and cultivation of the mind have a common root, at the very least etymologically speaking. Man started ploughing the fields before he was able to deal with intellectual pursuits. This is one of the many reasons why the "Parc Agrari" (Agrarian park) project is now defending agriculture in the Baix Llobregat area as a cultural treasure that cannot be lost.
The area surrounding Barcelona has many special green spaces such as Collserola or Garraf. But the surroundings of this highly urbanized nucleus where two thirds of the population of Catalonia live guard another much less known though very valuable green island. It is the so-called "Agrarian Park" in the Baix Llobregat area, which spreads over 3.000 hectares of cultivated land which have supplied the markets of the capital for centuries. Now, the fourteen local governments and the City Council of Barcelona have put a new plan into motion that is intended to guarantee the survival of local agriculture. In that sense, the planned actions are aimed at preventing urban progress and industrial development from cutting up that area which has been steadily punished since the nineteen fifties.
The name "Agrarian Park", however, could be confusing. What is in the Baix Llobregrat is not a natural park or a theme park. Those who come to the area misinformed will discover a depressing panorama. Major thoroughfares such as the N2-2, A-2, N-340, A-16, C-246, C-245 and the so-called "South Leg" ring road, high tension lines, industrial estates, suburban sprawl ... The area is crisscrossed with a swarm of roads and highways, a collection of varied infrastructures which in the next years will include a high speed train and other future projects that we cannot even start to imagine today. (...)
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the agricultural production in the delta of the Llobregat river was composed of fruit orchards in the highlands, fields of cereals and vegetables in the east and centre, horticulture in the west and the rest of the area. The sector arrived at maximum splendor in the nineteen thirties, when the cooperatives and the agriculture unions were operating at full capacity. Thousands of tons of products from the region were exported to Europe. A hundred train cars loaded with lettuce and forty cars full of artichokes left each day bound for France, Germany and Great Britain. The town of Molins de Rei mainly exported fruit, while Gavà exported carrots, lettuce, radishes, endives and melons... The star products of Gavà, however, were the wild asparagus and, above all, the artichokes.
This natural space is indeed a gift from God for agriculture. It has been said that, in certain aspects, it is even more fertile than the Nile valley. Surely, that is an exageration, but there are objective data supporting this idea : an average annual rainfall of 6.000 millimetres, a flat land protected from north and south winds by mountains, an average temperature of 16 degrees centigrade, with a maximum of 33 degrees and a minimum that rarely goes below zero...
Nevertheless, agricultural activity steadily continues to decline. Of the 400 farmers who once daily sold their products directly in local markets, only some seventy remain nowadays. Currently, fruits and vegetables from the Baix Llobregat area are esentially sold in Barcelona markets and they are taken to the Mercabarna central market only in times of overproduction.
On the other hand, in the last decades, the Baix Llobregat valley has been surprinsingly fertile for industries and appartment complexes. These human constructions are for the most part responsible for the loss of 500 hectares of farmable land over the last decade in the town of Sant Boi, and now only 800 hectares remain. And the loss of farmable hectares may not end here. A few years ago, expropriations were made for the construction of the Baix Llobregat highway and the "South Leg" ring road, and more are presently being prepared to make space for the AVE high speed train.
The Baix Llobregat Agrarian Park project was born in 1995, fostered by the Metropolitan Corporation of Barcelona. It was established that it was necessary to act urgently in order to stop that process of farmland urbanization. And to act first meant to protect. It meant saving the area from all types of pressure that might affect it further : city-planning pressure, demographic pressure, infrastructural pressure, pressure from the construction of new facilities, road traffic pressure, contamination pressure, etc... The plan immediately received the support of the Regional Council, the City Council and the Farmers' Union.
Official requests for aid from the European Union were made. It was suggested that the plan be included in the "Life" programme. However, while the European Union authorities clearly believed that the type of protective measures being considered could be applied to a mountain area, they did not feel that they could be similarly applied to a city's peripheral area. Eventually, in 1996, the Baix Llobregat area received the designation "Urban Zone 24", which corresponds with agricultural areas that are seriously threatened by their surroundings. For cultural and environmental reasons as well as economic reasons, the European Union allowed itself to be convinced of the importance that the agricultural areas of the Baix Llobregat region remain populated, and that development of the activity that has gone on there for many centuries continue, In fact, it is more economical for the farmers to take control of the preservation of these green spaces, even if their activity is not actually highly productive, than to have them disappear, thus forcing the government to manage the area directly. (...)

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The "La Caixa" Contemporary Art Collection is brought out into the open.
by Mercè Ibarz

Next year will start with an outstanding event in the sphere of plastic arts and, more particularly, in the field of art collectorship : from the month of January on, the public will have the opportunity to see and analyze, from a twenty-first century perspective, an interesting selection of art works from the "La Caixa" Contemporary Art Collection, a collection that has been built up according to constantly renovated and widely eclectic criteria since its creation in 1985. These works of art will be exhibited in a new space, namely the "CaixaFòrum", the new cultural centre run by the "La Caixa" savings bank and located at the foot of the Montjuïc hill. The exhibition of the masterpieces from the collection will last only two months. Later on, there will changes in the selection of exhibited works. So this will not be a permanent exhibition, but rather a permanent exhibition room in which the different aspects of the Collection will be shown to the public.
Seventeen years after its foundation, the Collection is at last brought out into the open to be shown to the city of its birth where it had become a point of reference for other public art institutions of great importance such as the MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Reina Sofia Museum, providing them with the possibility of exhibiting pieces by Spanish and Catalan artists whose works have now become probitively expensive. The "La Caixa" Collection had also become an important pointer for biennal art shows and museums at an international level.
We cannot fail to underline another significant aspect of this event which will serve as a meeting place for experts and the general public : the sometimes phantasmagoric veil with which the Collection was shrouded - as it could not be seen for lack of a proper permanent exhibition space - will at long last be drawn back. The public will be able to admire the most numerous selection of pieces from the Collection ever exhibited up to now. Because, it is one thing to build up an art collection, and quite another to desplay it and lay it out within a suitable space. For a good two months, the next exhibition will allow us to contemplate the masterpieces from the Collection in a leisurely way. If everything goes according to schedule, there will be a quarterly replacement of the artworks desplayed in the permanent exhibition room which, within the former "modernist" Casaramona factory, now altered and remodelled into the new cultural centre of the "La Caixa" savings bank, will house this significant, though very little known art collection.
The history of that stock of works of art has been marked by cautiousness. Up to now, it had only been exhibited in small, very partial selections and there was only one representative public display in Sevilla back in 1992, when the city was hosting the International Exhibition. It was a significant show that occupied some 5.000 square metres. That was when the people in charge of the Collection decided to change its artistic criteria and, soon after, to also replace its council of consultants. The exhibition scheduled for next year will undoubtedly be very different. (...)

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Anna Cabré: "We have nineteen-century concepts but we are faced
with twenty-first-century realities".
by Felicia Esquinas

In her book "El sistema catalá de reproducció" (The Catalan reproduction system) (1999), she states that she was first "introduced to demography as the art to unveil mysteries and resolve paradoxes by Louis Henry; a perspective that is still valid today, in spite of the undoubtedly strong influence exerted by others who view demography as a more or less technical listing of figures". From that time on, she has never ceased to search for answers and her professional trajectory has won her international recognition. She studied Demography and Political Economy in Paris and gave lectures at various universities in Montreal, Chicago, Paris and Mexico City. An elected member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Council, she is currently Professor of Human Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona as well as the head of the "Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics" (Catalonia's Centre for Demographic Studies) at that same university, a position she has been holding since the setting-up of the Centre in 1984. We are talking about Anna Cabré (Barcelona, 1943), one of the most lucid voices of present-day demography. (...)
· Which are the most important demographic phenomena at the present time ?
There are only three demographic phenomena, and the three are important : fertility rates, death - and its contrary, survival - rates, and migrations. At the present time, the most visible as well as the trendiest factor is immigration. Most people are attaching great importance to immigration nowadays. Technically speaking and in demographic terms, immigration is the coming of people into a place which is not the place of their birth in order to live and work there, i.e. the integration of outsiders into a native population. If we are referring to the population of Catalonia, and more particularly to the population of Barcelona, it is not likely that there will be an inflow of immigrants as numerous as those that took place in the past. In the case of the city of Barcelona, that is particularly clear, because there is no free space left : the city cannot possible take in as many emigrants as it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because its population has already reached saturation point; there is no space left for new constructions and there is little prospect of significant growth. So, where Barcelona and Catalonia are concerned, immigration is not going to become a more important factor demography-wise than it was in the past.
· And where the whole of Spain is concerned ?
Where Spain is concerned, it will play an important role. Because, contrary to what happened in Catalonia, Spain has long been a country where the trend was towards emigration, until some twenty years ago, when this trend was reversed, in my opinion irreversibly. Now, Spain, just as most European countries, is changing over from a emigratory experience to an immigratory experience. And it has to get used to the fact that this immigratory movement has become the most important contributing factor to demographic evolution. In those terms, here in Catalonia, it should be much easier to deal with the issue of immigration given that not only have we experienced immigration, we actually are the result of an immigration process. (...) Immigration has been the crucial factor determining the rate of demographic growth in Catalonia for more than one century now. One of the data which I once produced and which are currently circulating freely without my knowing the source of such diffusion, is the following were it not for the flow of immigrants during the twentieth century, the population of Catalonia would not exceed two and a half million inhabitants today; the remainder - up to the country's current population of six millions - is the result of immigration in the twentieth century. (...) Thus, in demographic terms, there are two major migratory components in Catalonia's population : the flow of French immigrants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the flow of Spanish immigrants during the nineteenthth and twentieth centuries. (...) Consequently, those Catalans who are not descendants of the Andalousians, Aragoneses or Murcians who came in the twentieth century, are descendants of the French who immigrated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Catalonia really deserves praise for having succeeded in building and sustaining a cohesive society with such important immigratory elements.(...)
· You said before that immigration has been the basis for demographic growth in Catalonia for more than one hundred years and you analyzed that phenomenon in your book "The Catalan reproduction system". What does this system actually consist in ?
What I call "Catalan reproduction system" is a system in which immigracion is an endogenous component. It is not a system in which immigration is an accidental occurrence, but one in which the flow of immigrants is a systematic feature. In such a system, one part of the population is comprised of the descendants of the previous inhabitants and the other part is made up of immigrants. The latter hold some very well defined positions on the social ladder and the labour market, complementing the autochthonous population rather than replacing it. As a matter of fact, what we are referring to as the "Catalan reproduction system" has become a universal system, now preponderant in all wealthy countries without exception. Presently, there is no developed country in which immigration is not a significant component. So now I prefer to refer to what I initially called "Catalan reproduction system" as a "complex reproduction system" - complex insofar as it is a binomial : it is comprised of a part which is biological reproduction and of another part which I call "immigratory reproduction", because we expect that part of each generation will be made up of people coming from other places -; even though, lately, I've been thinking whether it would not be more accurate to call it "urban reproduction system".
· Because this is a system characteristic of a urban environment ?
Because this is a system which has always prevailed in all cities around the world. It is quite difficult to imagine a city in which there would be no immigration, a city in which nobody new would come to live, a city where generation after generation of inhabitants would be exclusively comprised of the previous inhabitants' children, without arrivals from the outside. This would not be a real city, it would merely be a large village. I think that, in wealthy, developed countries with a high level of specialization in terms of quality and, why not, power, in the world-wide distribution of activity and wealth, immigration is an endogenous part of the reproduction system, in the same way as, from antiquity up until our times, immigration has always been an essential demographic component in all large cities around the world.
(...)
· According to United Nations sources, Europa will need to incorporate 125 million new emigrants over the next twenty-five years...
United Nations experts have made estimates which conclude that, in order to maintain certain parameters, Europe would need such large numbers of emigrants. However, will those emigrants actually come or not ? That is another matter altogether. In fact, these estimates issued by the United Nations have been interpreted in a rather frivolous, shallow and irresponsible way as actual forecasts of future migratory movements. But immigrants come to Europe to work and do certain specific tasks. If jobs are available, they will come but otherwise they will not come. The motivations behind present-day emigration are economic, not demographic. So that migratory movements cannot be foreseen, because nobody knows what the economy of the future will be like. In these times of economic globalization, jobs have become movable, because multinational companies - as well as local smaller firms - can shut down factories, stop production lines and suddenly move a whole series of jobs from one place to another... Nobody knows anything about either the specifications or the locations of the jobs that will be available in the future; therefore, nobody knows what emigration will be like in the future.
· And which hypotheses is the work carried out by the "Centre d'Estudis Demografics" premised on ?
At the "Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics", we have recently completed a piece of work which the European Union had assigned to us. And, taking our own hypotheses - which are rather moderate - as a basis for estimation, we have come to the conclusion that, between now and the year 2050, the population of Spain will not drop below forty million inhabitants : it will be maintained somewhere between forty and 42,5 million inhabitants. And those hypotheses take future immigration into account; but, according to our estimates, our country should take in some four million immigrants over a period of fifty years, with percentages of foreigners that never exceed 7,5 per cent. (...) However, will these estimates become realities ? Nobody knows for sure. (...) But an aspect of the situation which is in my opinion unsustainable - an it was a basic element in the United Nations forecasts - is that fertility rates might in a near future remain as low as the ones registered in the nineteen nineties. Because those stand out as historically low figures which are not likely to be maintained over the next fifty years, probably not even over the next five years.
· What do you think of the establishment of a quota system to regulate immigration ?
Well, there ought to be some sort of selection process where immigrants are concerned. I am not really an expert in this subject, but it seems to me that setting rigid quotas does not make much sense because the requirements of the labour market are very variable. We cannot establish either too high a quota in a period of recession or too low a quota in a period of economic expansion, as it happened very recently in our country. What is the use of maintaining a quota of 20.000 or 30.000 immigrants if the labour market is able to absorb 100.000 or more per year ? But I do not know which measures should be taken. Here, as Antonio Izquierdo - who is an expert - says, we have created an immigration system based on irregularity. It is actually an impracticable system, with exceedingly low quotas and lengthy legalization processes, which makes illegal immigration the only way to gain entrance to our country : immigrants come as tourists or are smuggled into the country and become illegal workers... Even in the case of people who have put down roots in our country, it takes years for immigrants to achieve status as legal residents. Which is to say that we allow a situation to continue in which those people who have lived in our country illegally for a number of years are eventually awarded legal status as a reward for having survived in such an illegal situation. We therefore perpetuate a system which uses irregularity as an element in the legalization process. It does not seem to be the most ideal frame of reference. (...)

Page 28
The New Diagonal. The end of a great work
by Joan Clos

Ildefons Cerdà conceived Diagonal Avenue as the main street of the city. It was the longest throroughfare that crossed Barcelona and served to connect the city with the urban areas situated at its extremes. At the same time, it constituted the practically unique exception to the orthogonal structure that was a distinguishing town-planning feature in the whole "Eixample" district.
The so-called "Diagonal", however, was much more than that. It was the main thoroughfare which began the reconnection of Barcelona with neighbouring villages, with Gràcia, Les Corts, Sant Gervasi, and Sant Martí de Provencals. We are in fact talking about the avenue that served as the basis for the unification of the city as we know it today.
It was in 1884 when the construction of Diagonal Avenue began with the urbanization of the section between Pau Claris street and Passeig de Gràcia. The levelling of the area of land between Passeig de Gràcia and Balmes street began in 1886, while the City Council of Sant Martí started opening sections of the avenue on the village's edge closest to Barcelona. It was not until well into the nineteen twenties that the Diagonal went beyond Plaça Francesc Macià to reach the Pedralbes neighbourhood.
The last extension of Diagonal avenue, between Plaça de les Glories and the Rambla Prim, was carried out in the nineteen nineties. Through these works, the city opened its borders towards the Besòs river, and the Plaça de les Glories was no longer one of the extreme points of the city as it occupied the central location that it deserved -, and that Cerdà had envisioned - as a meeting point between the principal avenues of the city.
Thanks to that last extension of Diagonal Avenue, the streets of the Poblenou district are no longer cut off in the middle of a tangled mess of warehouses, instead they are at last allowed to play the connecting role they were intended for and, in the process, they have brought the sea closer to all the people of Barcelona. This extension has also brought the urbanistic order and centrality necessary to develop a project of that magnitude and complexity, destined to attract advanced industries and activities - related to knowledge, culture, new technologies and the emerging economy - to our city. To sum it up, we have developed a town-planning model in which the most important thing is not to open new streets, but to give them deeper meaning by generating new areas that really serve a purpose.
But Diagonal avenue will not stop at the Rambla Prim. In 2004, it will grow even more, not limiting itself in arriving to the coast, but going further to fully enter the sea in order to highlight the open and Mediterranean atmosphere native to our city.
Furthermore, Diagonal avenue will unite the city's research centres : the "Zona Universitària" (University Campus) and the Poblenou area where the future LLevant campus will be located; and, together with the "Front Marítim" (Waterfront), which goes all the way to the Pompeu Fabra University's facilities, it will constitute a true avenue of knowledge. In this way, Diagonal avenue will become something more than the principal entrance to the city by remodelling itself into the pathway leading to the future and the cement bonding the metropolitan city, the greater Barcelona that is developing together with Sant Adrià at the mouth of the Besòs river.
We therefore belong to a privileged generation of Barcelona residents, of those who will finally see how the construction of the principal artery of the city will be completed after 120 years of works. And we will celebrate the event in the appropriate way, with the festive "Forum Universal de les Cultures" (Universal Cultures Forum) which will be held precisely where Diagonal avenue meets the sea, at the mouth of the Besòs river. In this way, the thoroughfare that served to reunite the city with its so-called "annexed" surrounding villages will now serve as the stage for the meeting of cultures from all over the world.
We want the Diagonal to be the symbol of the town-planning style peculiar to Barcelona. A town-planning style that aims at making the city a true meeting place and that places the highest value on public spaces.
Diagonal avenue has become a veritable urbanistic manifesto vindicating civic beauty produced through the social and cultural commitment of the people of Barcelona with the development of their city.
At this point in time, the city of Barcelona boasts the largest town-planning project in Europe, even superior to what is happening in Berlin, with the difference that it is not the capital of a state and that the transformation of Barcelona is not a result of being a capital city, but of the drive and ambition of the city itself. We are talking about a project that has a much deeper social meaning than the one carried out at the time of the Olympic Games, a project that has a momentum capable of multiplying the areas currently considered as "central" parts of the city. And we want this significant, in-depth renovation process to have quality as a value added to the whole project.
Barcelona has always distinguished itself by a dynanism that embraces all aspects of urban life, enriching it with its diversity. Such an active citizenry as ours is an essential component to urban quality and civic identity. Public spaces, from the most modest alley to the largest square, form part of the stage on which our day-to-day lives develop and thence have sufficient presence and power to improve or thwart our urban lifestyle.
The city's urbanistic quality is outstanding and we want it to be accompanied by architectural quality. The new Diagonal town-planning scheme has generated projects that are meant to produce buildings that will become emblematic constructions in the Barcelona of the future, from the magnificent tower designed by Jean Nouvel and located at the edge of the Plaça de les Glories, to the triangular area planned by Herzog and de Meuron at the other end of the avenue, within the premises of the Fòrum.
It is evident that each historical period of time has its own architecture. Barcelona will maintain the gothic profile that characterizes the city when we see it from the sea, but the new areas under development will display a new profile, a new distinctive skyline that will give them character.
By taking these steps, we are doing nothing more than keeping up Barcelona's long tradition of architectural preeminence, that of a city whose principal monuments are the buildings themselves. A look around the "Eixample" is actually enough to confirm us in this view, because that district constitutes a whole catalogue of the best architecture from the early twentieth century, when Cerda's plan was being carried out. Nowadays, as Barcelona develops towards the Besòs area, we have a new opportunity of which we cannot - and do not want to - fail to take advantage and this is one of the reasons why we are steadily working to complement Barcelona's urbanistic development with the best buildings designed by the best architects. To do anything else would betray our city's spirit of architectural innovation.

Page 31
The Diagonal, history of an ambition

The Diagonal is Barcelona's widest street and, now that it has been extended, also its longest. The history of its progression across the New Town and out as far as the city limits has occupied more than a century. It started in 1884, when the short section between Carrer Pau Claris and Passeig de Gràcia was built, and will finish in the context of the urban planning scheme for the Besòs area.
This issue's monograph features a tour of the main milestones of this history, which took place in the social and political context of a Barcelona in constant urban expansion. The initial growth of the avenue towards the River Llobregat was the catalyst for a profound transformation of the then basically rural area between Turó Parc and Bruc Barracks, where the avenue then came to an inglorious halt.
The work done by urban designers, architects and politicians towards the shaping of the Diagonal, the anecdotes associated with it, the principal historical events that have occurred there and descriptions by some of the city's leading chroniclers make up the first series of articles. The second part is dedicated to the description of the main lines of the project that, after so many years, will finally bring the ambitious avenue designed by Ildefons Cerdà to the sea.

A century on the Diagonal
Lluís Permanyer

The Diagonal is the street whose layout endows the Eixample or New Town with most personality; this was the result of a survey conducted among the students of the School of Engineering. This fact, also linked to design, is now confirmed by the upholstery of the new model of municipal bus. Cerdà traced a line that made a clean break with the orthogonal monotony of his Plan for the New Town, prior to Jaussely's Urban Linkage Plan of 1905. However, it was no mere stylistic contrivance but the maximum exponent of one of the three classes of public space for circulation that he himself had defined: the passage, the street and the main thoroughfare. The last of these was designed to join two very distant urban centres, which explains why the Diagonal is the widest of the city's streets, and now also the longest.
The length of the Diagonal is justification of the fact that it has a great many stories attached to it, not just because sections of it have lived a very diverse and personalized development, but also because it is logical that the urbanization of more than 11 kilometres should take so many years.
The Diagonal had an unspectacular birth in 1884, the first section to be built stretching only from Pau Claris to Passeig de Gràcia (…).
This imposing, solemn, grandiose avenue was named by Cerdà himself, in keeping with his functional mentality: Gran Via Diagonal, in reference to the shape it describes. The New Town's official name-giver, Víctor Balaguer, whose own contribution was huge and very creative, kept Cerdà's name. However, the future proved to be a great deal less respectful in this regard, and the Diagonal underwent the typical changes of name that the political powers find it so irresistible to make to such an important thoroughfare. The first change was in 1891, and was rather surprising: it was named after Agustín Argüelles, who had nothing to do with either the city or the country. It took me some time to find out the reason for this choice, but in the end it turned out to be the power of the Masons. In 1922 the avenue was named after the "Catalan Nationality", but this didn't last long; the coup led by General Primo de Rivera brought a return to the Mason Argüelles, or more to the point, the elimination of a Catalan nationalist reference which at the time caused offence. The following year, however, the flattery in which the dictatorship indulged induced them to change the dedication to Alfonso XIII. No surprise, then, that when the Republic was declared the street's name became 14 April. Equally predictably, this game, always linked to the circumstances of the moment, came back into operation the day after the occupation of the city by Franco's army; they got rid of the Republican name, which was the most pressing matter, and with neither imagination nor commitment reverted to Gran Vía Diagonal. However, before 1939 was out the practice of praising power imposed the name Generalísimo Franco. The great thing was, the people of Barcelona took no notice of all these changes and stuck to the popular name of Diagonal, which was restored officially in 1979 during the overhauling of the street names left by the Franco regime.
The avenue was a stimulating setting for owners and architects to ennoble by raising flagship buildings, as had been the case on Passeig de Gràcia, for example. Yet this was not to happen. Mediocrity has been the norm, and curiously has affected all the styles. There have been few exceptions. (...).
Modernisme, the Catalan brand of Art Nouveau, inspired a few noteworthy examples, although one would like them to be more numerous. The showiest work is undoubtedly the Casa de les Punxes (House of Spikes), by Puig i Cadafalch, for the simple reason that it is the most spectacular in all Barcelona, a city where terraced construction has been the rule. Palauet del Baró de Quadras, also by Puig i Cadafalch, is striking for its stonework. In Casa Serra (on the corner with Rambla de Catalunya) the same architect paid a sentimental tribute to the former Casa Gralla, but it was never occupied and its conversion into a school inevitably meant mutilation. Casa Comalat (No. 442), by the architect Salvador Valeri i Pupurull, is crowned with a hat that is reminiscent of a harlequin's, but its exhibitionism only really comes into its own on the strongly undulating back facade, on Carrer Còrsega. Palau Pérez Samanillo, on the corner of Carrer Balmes, was designed as a single-family residence and was originally surrounded by a garden. Casa Sayrach (No. 423) is one of the very few works of a rich architect who unfortunately allowed himself the luxury of doing very little with his time. This building dates from 1918, and as such is regarded as the last manifestation of Modernisme (...).
The mouth-watering Diagonal was the best possible scenario Noucentisme had for its architects to exhibit works that would surpass and overshadow those of the detested Modernisme, but the truth was that in architecture the style was not up to the job. Perhaps the most interesting was the Grup Escolar Ramon Llull (inaugurated as late as 1931, although it was designed in 1919), a school by the architect Josep Goday with sgraffito decoration by Francesc Canyellas (...).
As could be expected, a Diagonal had to slice with inevitable irregularity across the orthogonal order severely imposed by an engineer such as Cerdà, and this created a series of residual spaces. Very sensibly, the opinion soon arose that these spaces should be lightened up a little with restrained recourse to small-format sculptures, in the form of a number of sculpted drinking fountains by Josep Campeny, rightful winner of the municipal competition called to this effect.
In 1904 the Barcelona newspaper nicknamed El Brusi published an article in which it was suggested that the intersection with Passeig de Gràcia cried out for a monument, which they proposed could be dedicated to Pi i Margall. The idea was well received and in 1909 the City Council commissioned the architect Pere Falqués to design a rather ornate bunch of street lamps in order to begin defining the space. The middle was left empty awaiting the impending monument, and the appearance of the provisional arrangement caused the people of Barcelona, in typical style, to baptize it as the "Cinc d'Oros" (Five of Coins, coins being one of the four suits in the Spanish pack of cards). It would be too long and wearisome to tell in any detail all the vicissitudes that befell the monument that was supposed to pay tribute to the former president of the Republic. To cut a long story short, Mayor Pich i Pon inaugurated it almost clandestinely in 1935, to the extent that President Companys saw fit to do so again in 1936, but this time with due solemnity.
The monument was striking for its figure of the Republic, by Vallmitjana, which stood on top of the obelisk (...).
The other large monument was that to Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer, which bore a statue of the poet by Borrell i Nicolau. The inauguration was controversial due to the attendance of the King, who for the past year had reigned with the blessing of the dictatorship. As a result, a number of famous names of the time in culture and politics, led by the playwright Àngel Guimerà, boycotted the event and at the scheduled time went to Montjuïc Cemetery and put flowers on Verdaguer's grave.
The picture painted by the Diagonal at that time between the Verdaguer Monument and what would later become Plaça de les Glòries was a disappointing one, and confirmed the trend towards a pattern of growth very different from what Cerdà had envisaged. It should come as no surprise, then, that in Lluís Capdevila's 1926 description we find a landscape of vegetable patches, taverns, pedlars, gipsies and so on.
Les Corts means "farmhouses" in Catalan. The gently sloping plain of Barcelona between the formerly outlying towns of Sarrià and Les Corts, now intersected by the Diagonal, was once dotted with farmhouses on land that was ideal for arable farming and also supported brickworks. It enjoyed a pleasant climate that attracted the aristocracy to their summer residences and the sick to convalescent homes (...).
It was [a] placid, rural, bucolic scene that was suddenly to change when Cambó decided that it was unacceptable that the King had no palace to stay in on his visits to Barcelona, as the one the crown owned in the old town was burned down in 1875. (...) In 1919 Joan Antoni Güell (...) proposed that the new royal palace which Barcelona was to provide Alfonso XIII should be built on an estate purchased by his grandfather Joan (...). In order to help the scheme along, he made the almost 69,000 square metres of land available at the symbolic price of 25,000 pesetas. It is true that this was an act of exemplary generosity, but it is equally true that it was inspired by the inescapable fact that the construction of the palace would make it necessary to extend the Diagonal, thus automatically attaching a colossal added value to the large estates he still owned in the area (...).
The architect Jesús Portavella, who has also carried out a study of Barcelona place-names, has done research that shows that Cerdà drew the route of the Diagonal in such a way that there was no need to demolish many of the farmhouses mentioned above. It appears that their eventual destruction was due to poor alignment when putting the plans into practice.
The palace was presented to the King with much pomp in 1926. He had been looking forward greatly to having the palace, but he had little time to enjoy it. He held a few events and receptions there during the 1929 International Exhibition, but with the change of regime it was declared a national historical monument, confiscated by the state, immediately ceded to the City Council and turned into the Museum of Decorative Arts, which was inaugurated by Macià at the end of 1932.
The architect Francesc de Paula Nebot was responsible for drafting the cross section of the new Diagonal, which followed a very different pattern from the old one. One of the functions of Plaça Francesc Macià was to disguise this break and provide a focal point from which to make such a difficult transition, and it succeeds admirably. The square was tastefully designed in 1928 by Rubió i Tudurí, although it was not built until 1934. All the weight of the new boulevard was put on the south-facing inland side, while at the insistence of the mayor, Baron de Viver, the side facing the sea had only an earth bridle-path used by the horse-riders of the Royal Polo Club. Fifty metres wide in the New Town section, the avenue acquired an unprecedented width beyond the square: 84 metres in the section up to Carrer Entença and 92 from there to Plaça Maria Cristina.
A definite change occurs when we reach Palau Reial, where Rubió i Tudurí, who was also responsible for the trees, interrupted the landscape in order to draw attention to the otherwise hardly noticeable palace surrounded by a prosaic wall. The space was ennobled with three sculptures, by Llimona, Tarrac and Casanovas, which had been banished from Plaça de Catalunya as immoral, in a stridently moralistic, Bible-bashing campaign.
This brand new Diagonal became home to Palauet Abadal (1926), Junior Football Club (1931), Bruc Barracks (1932) and the Royal Polo Club (1932), which succeeded in attracting the chosen few of Barcelona to such a far-flung district (...).
We have to think back to those times to understand that the Diagonal was far from the centre, and the new Diagonal very far; remember that very few people in Barcelona had a car. As a result, before the War it hadn't really taken shape as a place to take a stroll, except for certain rather special occasions such as the twelve-o'clock and one-o'clock masses held on feast days at the Pompeia and Carmelite churches. One or two attractive establishments had been opened, such as Parellada, with its tables on the street, which occupied the corner with Carrer Còrsega opposite Palau Robert, and the Mora confectioner's shop.
The Diagonal played an important part in the fascist uprising against the Republican government. Some of the rebels marched out of Bruc Barracks early on the morning of the coup, and were joined by a number of civilians who had gathered at the Espanyol football ground. When they arrived at the Cinc d'Oros the first clash of forces took place, causing some of the rebels to make a stand in the Carmelite church; they were besieged and eventually surrendered.
The anticlerical reaction, which needed no encouragement to say the least, brought about an unsuccessful attempt to topple a sculpture by Llimona on the facade of the Pompeia church. The relief of the Sacred Heart that decorated the pediment on the facade of Palauet Pérez Samanillo was hammered to bits, while the sgraffito on Casa Company, by Puig i Cadafalch, was destroyed by the owner himself as a lesser evil, in view of the troubled times.
In the thick of the Civil War, the spectacular Diagonal, the city's grandest space, was chosen for the tribute that was held to see off the foreign volunteers who had come to fight against fascism in the International Brigades. The parade took place on 28 October 1938, and was an intense show of human emotion.
Part of the troops that occupied Barcelona entered the city along the Diagonal. And the great victory parade, presided over by Franco from the first-floor balcony of number 508, was held with the same backdrop, which was beginning to become the natural choice. It was unsurprising under the circumstances that a grateful Francoist of the likes of José Garí Gimeno should donate a very well located site to the army to build a residence for officers. The building was designed by Solà-Morales and Soteras.
The bourgeoisie had had a hard time and saw leisure as the best way to get back in the saddle. Summer was the best time for that, and the new establishments that were opened at the top of the Diagonal gave the sensation that one was far from the city and the madding crowd (...).
The Diagonal had achieved its most challenging objective: to compete on a par with Passeig de Gràcia as an elegant and appealing place for pedestrians to take a stroll. Towards the end of the 1950s it was young and trendy to be seen there (the Boliche tenpin bowling alley, named after the tango, was proof of this). It didn't last long. A pity. And now unfortunately the process has been perfected; walking there has been rendered a physical impossibility by the creation of a danger-filled assault course in the form of a bike lane along the pavement. The Catalan government wants to finish the job by shoehorning the tram in - anything to avoid the spending that's needed, namely the metro.
Not only are tall buildings good to see on the Diagonal; some of them are not tall enough. However, the most important thing is the quality of the design and particularly of the materials. I think it fitting that the newest Diagonal, the one that is being born now, has been regarded as the right kind of terrain for this kind of architecture, and also that the scale of the avenue demands the construction of grand volumes. But that is another story.

A tour of the corners of the memory: the Eastern Diagonal and the Western Diagonal
By Jaume Fabre

The 1953 Regional Plan took in two main zones of expansion for the municipality of Barcelona, in the only two places that still had extensive areas of undeveloped land: one where the city approached the River Besòs and the other at the western end of the Diagonal, on the road to Lleida and Tarragona.
In the Franco years, these two areas grew out of two partial plans. At one end there were the Eastern Zone (North) and the Eastern Zone (South), which gave rise to the neighbourhoods of La Verneda and those southwest of the Besòs. The other end of the city included the North Zone (from Plaça Francesc Macià to what is now the Ronda del Mig or Middle Ring Road) and the End Zone (from the Ronda del Mig to the city limit) of the "Avenida del Generalísimo Franco", which as everyone knows, was what you had to put on the envelope when really you meant the Diagonal.
These partial plans, the most far-reaching of those carried out in the 1960s, were far more important than any of the others of the Porcioles era, and they have had an influence on the shape of the city that is comparable to that of the Plan for the New Town.
The area adjoining the Besòs was once marshy and insalubrious, a veritable maresma or swamp, as the name of one of the local streets reminds us. No doubt this was why the 1953 Regional Plan designated the area as a workers' residential zone, whereas it designated the top of the Diagonal, where the air was healthy, as a residential area for the bourgeoisie. This planned segregation took place at a time when the decision-makers in town planning did not act under the control of democratic bodies.
So it was that two kinds of districts grew up, well away from each other: on the one hand, high-class neighbourhoods with extensive parkland, good facilities, a low population density and high-quality architectural elements, and on the other, overcrowded working-class districts in underprivileged locations without green spaces, with few facilities and buildings that in some cases have had to be demolished owing to the poor quality of the construction.
The work done over the past 20 years by the democratic urban planning authorities has gone a long way towards turning the neighbourhoods that grew up in the eastern zone into decent residential areas, and have succeeded in correcting many of their original in-built defects. The transformation of La Verneda is probably the most spectacular change for the better Barcelona has registered since the end of the Franco regime. The creation of Rambla de Guipúscoa and Rambla Prim have provided the framework for this change. However, the division into social classes is more difficult to eradicate, even though the passing of the years and the trend towards economic progress has softened its effects to some extent. (...)

The Diagonal of the rich
I was born in 1948 on a fifth-floor flat without a lift in the Esquerra de l'Eixample - the left-hand side of the New Town - towards the top of Carrer Villarroel, behind the hospital. There were no green spaces there, and my parents took me to play either in Turó Parc, where I have vague memories of performances by the puppet master Didó in the little theatre, or to the landscaped pavement flanking the Diagonal outside Palau de Pedralbes. You couldn't enter the grounds of the palace. They were open during the Republic, but the Franco regime had closed them again.
On that pavement there were some shallow ponds where the children of well-off families pulled their toy boats on a string or pushed them with a stick, and those of us from not-so-well-off families sailed walnut shells and boats made of bark or paper. I think I remember (although I may be mixing things) how envious I was of a boy who had a boat with a clockwork engine, and how, to cheer me up, somebody in my family very ingeniously made me one with an elastic band that you wound up and which drove a propeller when you let go.
It was around that time that the Eucharistic Congress was held, my only memories of it being the white flags on the balconies and the religious music they played on the radio. That, and the sensation of being suffocated in the crowd (I was only four at the time). I have no recollection of the shanties that lined part of the Diagonal in Les Corts during the 1940s, before the Eucharistic Congress in 1952. The Congress provided the impetus for the first stage of urbanization of that part of the Diagonal, prior to the Regional Plan. It was then that Plaça de Pius XII was created, and the shanty-dwellers were rehoused in flats in Can Clos and El Verdum, hastily built on the orders of the Civil Governor. (...)

The Diagonal of the Poor
In the summer of 1954 my family moved to a different neighbourhood. From the top of Carrer Villarroel, which had enabled me to get to know the western Diagonal, we moved to Passeig Carles I, which gave me firsthand knowledge of the eastern Diagonal, or to be more exact the area where years later the continuation of the Diagonal, at that time blocked off by railway tracks, was to be opened up.
I was taken to the Dogs' Convent, which is what everybody called Ramon Llull School (...). Like five other schools in the same situation, it was opened during the Republic because Primo de Rivera had stopped the building work, and it retained not only its size - it seemed big to me, although I was only little - but even its progressive Catalan name (...). But a name doesn't mean much, and the education we were given was in the most orthodox line of the time. That said, I can't remember ever being made to sing the fascist anthem, Cara al Sol, when we went into school. Instead they had us marching round the playground chanting "Grupo escolar Ramón Llull, grupo escolar Ramón Llull..." The rhythm of the words got us well worked up for the militaristic regime of the lessons to come (...).
What I remember most about that Diagonal of the Dogs' Convent was entering and leaving school on wet days, because of the chaos that reigned in an area that was still poorly urbanized. Carrer Aragó, which crosses the Diagonal at that point, was still occupied by the railway cutting (...), and beyond Passeig Carles I there wasn't even a cutting: the train carried on towards Plaça de les Glòries and France Station on ground level.
What is now Plaça Pablo Neruda didn't even have a name then. Perhaps it was already officially called Plaza de la Hispanidad, but if so nobody knew, because in no way did it resemble a square. Nor did it look like the Diagonal, which literally finished when it reached Carrer Aragó. A little further up it was a distinguished Diagonal, with the Verdaguer Monument, but as seen from Ramon Llull School the Diagonal was on the other side of the railway track. It didn't belong to us. Our side was the beginning of the Diagonal of the future, which we had to wait half a century to see (...).

And between the two...
Between the two ends of the Diagonal, that of Les Corts in the west and that of Sant Martí in the east, there is the oldest, most consolidated Diagonal. When they built it, did it look like Diagonal Mar does now? Over the century and more of its existence, this central Diagonal, the Diagonal that runs through the New Town, Gràcia and Sant Gervasi, has been the stage for some exciting moments of Barcelona's history, and some lamentable ones. One of the most lamentable was the Victory Parade on 21 February 1939, which to judge by the press photographs was largely ignored by the people of Barcelona. Franco saw it from the balcony of Casa Pérez Samanillo, Avinguda Diagonal number 504, between Carrer Balmes and Carrer Tuset. Exactly 37 years later, just after Franco's death, the people of Barcelona held massive demonstrations against letting the nightmare last any longer. Although the demonstrations for "Freedom, Amnesty and the Statute of Autonomy" of 1 and 8 February 1976 were centred around Carrer Aragó, there were many other secondary venues. On the eighth in particular, when the police action was more violent, the demonstrators scattered through the streets of the New Town up as far as the Diagonal and the Cinc d'Oros, which in previous years had often been the scene of demonstrations - or rather attempted demonstrations, because the presence of the police always thwarted any attempt to gather (...).
This is a Diagonal that is tightly interwoven with the history of Barcelona, without the asepsis of the two ends (one because it's too high-class and the other because it's too new). Every building, every corner, every monument, reminds us of the day-to-day life of this city at once bourgeois and revolutionary. Everything here is condensed, without the big open spaces at the two Diagonals of the ends. There are buildings to live in, workplaces and shops. Let's hope that one day the Diagonal that's growing up now beside the sea will be more like this Diagonal than the conceited one that extends towards the River Llobregat.

A tour of green spaces and monuments
By Josep M. Huertas

It might be rather excessive to quote Enric Satué and say that the Diagonal is an open-air museum, but it's true that to walk down it is to take a tour of green spaces and monuments, especially since 28 February 1999, as it is now complete, as Ildefons Cerdà designed it in his plan. It's a long street, stretching from number 2 (number 1 still awaits the hotel that the architect Òscar Tusquets is designing for the plot) to number 749, where it merges indistinctly into Esplugues de Llobregat (...).

Section 1. From Esplugues to Plaça Francesc Macià
A park on a dry riverbed. On 5 April 1964, to commemorate 25 years of peace under Franco, Mayor Porcioles inaugurated this park on the city limits, on land that had been a dry riverbed and wasteland. Part of it was made into a rose garden. The park covers 8.7 hectares and has three monuments, two of them very modest: a stele dedicated to Ángel Ganivet and another to Concha Espina, two writers that are given little heed nowadays. The third monument is Two Rhombuses (1977), an attractive sculpture by Andreu Alfaro. The off-white Barcelona rose first saw the light of day in 1995.
Hotel Juan Carlos I and the gardens of Torre Melina. Opposite Cervantes Park stands Turó Tennis Club, and behind that Hotel Juan Carlos I (1992), by the architect Carles de Ferrer, who also designed the nearby Palau de Congressos de Catalunya (2000); both these buildings were promoted with capital from the Arab world. The construction of the hotel involved the demolition of the pretty Torre Melina, with no permission of any sort. Its gardens are now the gardens of the hotel. Neither the hotel nor the gardens actually give onto the Diagonal, unlike The Journey, a sculpture by Xavier Corberó that resembles a sort of menhir. Corberó, like Alfaro, crops up more than once on the Diagonal (...).
Ernest Lluch's dialogue. In the Faculty of Economics, just inside the Carrer de l'Alhambra entrance, there is a curious sculpture consisting of 11 (the same number as the letters in the name "Ernest Lluch") methacrylate columns, entitled Dialogue. It was made by Ricard Vaccaro of Cornellà, who donated it to the University of Barcelona, where the ex-minister and economist Ernest Lluch taught. Lluch was assassinated by ETA on 21 November 2000. The sculpture was installed in June this year.
A major work of Coderch's. Cross back over the avenue to take a look at one of the few faculties that are housed in a noteworthy building, according to Oriol Bohigas, a harsh critic of the University District, who claims it was built "with very little feeling for culture and the city". The building in question is the extension to the School of Architecture (1985) by José Antonio Coderch. It is elegantly built in brick.
The missing "fallen". Continuing along the same side, we come to the site of a missing monument. The pedestal and the cross are still standing. This was the homage to the fallen on Franco's side during the Civil War. The monument, the work of the sculptor Josep Clarà and the architect Adolf Florensa (1951), was the object of an attack by activists towards the end of the dictatorship (1974), and another more definitive one - the whole piece of sculpture was destroyed - in 2001.
Palau de Pedralbes. Opposite this stands Palau de Pedralbes, the former royal palace. It was built in 1924 by the architects Eusebi Bona and Francesc de Paula Nebot on a country estate given to Alfonso XIII by Count Güell as a residence for the King's visits to Barcelona. The palace now houses the Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts, but its gardens, designed by Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, are also interesting. In front of the palace there is Agàpit Vallmitjana's attractive statue of Isabel II holding her son, Alfonso XII, and Gaudí's beautiful fountain, rediscovered by chance during clearance work in the gardens in 1983 (...).
The exiles from Plaça de Catalunya. Back outside the palace and its gardens, there are a number of statues which, for a variety of reasons, were banished from Plaça de Catalunya in 1928, when the square was designed as we know it today. They consist of a series of individual statues by Àngel Tarrach, Enric Casanovas, Eusebi Arnau and Josep Llimona, and two groups, one by Manuel Fuxà and the other by Jaume Otero. The latter, consisting of a group of nudes, was censored as immoral.
"The first modern, civilized public building". Architect Oriol Bohigas, for ever vehement, wrote that the Faculty of Law, by Guillermo Giráldez, Pedro López Iñigo and Xavier Subías, was "the first modern, civilized public building to be erected in Catalonia after the War". It dates from 1958, and over the main entrance there is a fine mural by the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs. A little further along the avenue, in the square named after Pope Pius XII, there is a monolith with a cross, by Julià Riu Serra.
A gate by Gaudí and Torre Rodona. On the other side of the avenue again and a short way down Avinguda de Joan XXIII, opposite the Faculty of Pharmacy, we find a gate by Gaudí which led into the Güell estate. A little way down the Diagonal from here is an old farmhouse called Mas Vinyals, but better known as Torre Rodona (1610), which the Gaspart family of hoteliers decided to make into the central office of their hotel group. It was restored in 1990, and is one of the few farmhouses left standing in Les Corts.
Earth and Fire. Carry on down this side of the Diagonal to the level of the Middle Ring Road; in the foreground against the black buildings of the Caixa savings bank is Joan Gardy Artigas' sculpture Earth and Fire. Erected in 1983, it weighs 80 tonnes and measures 15 metres in height. It is best seen in the afternoon, when the sun highlights its ochre and gold hues.
Palauet Abadal. Diagonal, 670. Opposite the monument Earth and Fire stands one of the few mansions that remain from a time when speculation was not so obsessive. Palauet Abadal (1930), built by Adolf Florensa in artificial stone, is now the head office of a bank. It consists of two storeys and is set amid gardens. Alongside it stands the Officers' Residence, a gift to the army from José Garí (1940). The residence was to be demolished to make way for a hotel in the period leading up to the Olympics, but in the end the plans were abandoned.
Martí i Julià and the analemmatic clock. In Plaça de Maria Cristina, in front of the Officers' Residence and - more importantly to many minds - opposite the Diagonal branch of the Corte Inglés department store, stands a female figure dedicated to the memory of the Republican politician and Catalan nationalist Domènec Martí i Julià, by the sculptor Josep Dunyach (1936). During the Franco regime it was stripped of its dedication and left as a meaningless ornament. Next to it there is a curious analemmatic clock, which tells you the time with your own shadow.
Cythère. When you have taken a look at the former head office of Banca Catalana (now occupied by Banco Bilbao Vizcaya), a building designed by Fargas i Tous and overflowing with plants, cross over the Diagonal and you will find a curious monument set in a pond. For a number of years the District of Les Corts organized a sculpture competition. Lluïsa Serra won it in 1990 with Cythère, inspired by the painting The Embarkation for Cythère, by the French artist Watteau. The sculpture was placed in this spot three years later.
The Hilton Hotel and Corberó's columns. Between the gardens dedicated to the historian Ferran Soldevila and Plaça Valdívia we find the Hilton Hotel (1990), by Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana. It is flanked by a characteristic sculpture of columns by Corberó which faces the building now occupied by Retevisión. Behind the hotel there is the old town of Les Corts, with a street named after Joan Gamper, the founder of Barcelona Football Club.
Olga Sacharoff's gardens. Crossing back over the Diagonal, behind a building, we find a secluded stretch of lawn: the gardens dedicated to the memory of the painter Olga Sacharoff. It is worth a visit for those who seek the quiet of the city's lesser known corners. (...)

Section 2. From Plaça Francesc Macià to Passeig Sant Joan
The nonagenarian oak. After this little detour to Turó Parc, which lies alongside the Diagonal, we return to Plaça Francesc Macià. Leaving the square along the side of the avenue that faces the sea, towards Carrer Villarroel, we pass by a 90-year-old holm oak (...).
The fountain of the boy with a fish. A few metres further on, there is one of the drinking fountains that line the city-centre section of the Diagonal. This one is called Boy Catching a Fish (1947), and like the above-mentioned Youth in Plaça Francesc Macià, it is by Josep Manuel Benedicto.
The Sports Museum. On the other side of the street, on the corner of Carrer Casanova and Carrer Buenos Aires, stands Casa Company (1911), a unique Modernista work by Puig i Cadafalch. In 1940 the house was converted into the surgery of doctor Melcior Colet. In June 1986 it underwent another change and became the Sports Museum. A bust of Baron de Coubertin, promoter of the first Olympic Games, shares the secluded courtyard with two garden statues holding lamps.
Joan Brossa's grasshopper. From here, cross back over the Diagonal. On the corner of Carrer Muntaner there is the beginning of a short side street, Passatge del Bon Pastor, with the offices of the Association of Surveyors. An artistically modern touch to the building is provided by the lettering on the frontage and a giant grasshopper on the roof, by the poet and occasional sculptor Joan Brossa and the painter and designer Pla-Narbona (1993). Seven years later, after Brossa's death, the Association held a competition to design a piece of art in commemoration of him. It was won by Carme de la Calzada and Jaume Barrera with their Sculpture of Light, consisting of a triangle with a plaque in the street.
Guinovart's book. The corner with Carrer Aribau forms another side street, Passatge Moià, which connects with Carrer Tuset. It harbours one of José Antonio Coderch's finest buildings, the French Institute (1975), and a curious sculpture that stands in front of it, Josep Guinovart's tribute to the book (...).
Casa Sayrach. Opposite this, on the side of the avenue facing the sea, stands Casa Sayrach (1918), a curious building by Manuel Sayrach that can also be ascribed to the Modernista style. It strikes a sharp contrast with the rationalism of the Diagonal Building (1934-40), by Ricard de Churruca, where the journalist Néstor Luján lived.
The centenary of Banco Atlántico. Skyscrapers are no novelty to Barcelona. During the Porcioles era planning permission was granted for a number of them, including the Banco Atlántico, which is celebrating its centenary this year. It is a glass and steel building by Francesc Mitjans and Santiago Balcells (1961), and on the ground floor there is another sculpture by Andreu Alfaro entitled Roads of Freedom.
The twin headquarters of the Provincial Council. In 1908 on the corner with Rambla de Catalunya, Josep Puig i Cadafalch erected a Modernista building, Casa Serra, which became a religious school for girls. Later on, a property developer attempted to build a block of flats on the site, and only a campaign by architects and the press succeeded in avoiding its demolition. The building was adapted as the new headquarters of Barcelona Provincial Council - until that time it shared the Palau de la Generalitat in Plaça de Sant Jaume with the Catalan government - with the addition of a new building alongside by Federico Correa and Alfons Milà (1987). (...)
The coquettish giraffe. In front of this building, at the end of Rambla de Catalunya, the sculptor Josep Granyer installed a giraffe known as the Coquette (1972). A bull by the same artist graces the other end of the rambla. The initiative was taken by the shopkeepers' association of this popular street. Just a few paces down from the giraffe there is a circular tablet in the pavement bearing the Barcelona Manifesto. It was installed during the now discontinued Film Festival, in which those present swore to combat the fashion of colouring black-and-white films and to respect them as they were originally made. Next to it there is a plaque with the signature of the American director George Sidney.
The fountain of the frog. On the corner of the Diagonal and Carrer Còrsega there is probably the finest fountain of all, the fountain of the frog. It shows a boy holding a frog with water pouring from its mouth. It was sculpted by Josep Campeny in 1912.
Pompeia on Sundays. The bourgeoisie took to attending Sunday mass at Pompeia church, which forms the corner with Riera de Sant Miquel on the side of the Diagonal that faces the hills. It was built by Enric Sagnier (1909), later Marquis of Sagnier, in a Modernista vein.
Palau Robert and the gardens by Ramon Oliva. Palau Robert (Jeroni Martorell and Henri Grandpierre, 1899), a survivor of more stately times on Passeig de Gràcia, today is home to the Catalan Tourist Board. It was built for Robert Robert, a leading light of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. The gardens, by Ramon Oliva, the designer of Parc de la Ciutadella, are even more interesting. They are now open to the public and provide an insight into what the gardens of the mansion of a well-to-do family of the time were like. Recently the gardens gained a new addition: an haro, a sort of totem pole which is erected every year in the village of Les and burnt the following year.
The Pencil and the Five of Coins. At the intersection of the Diagonal and Passeig de Gràcia stands an obelisk with a female figure draped in a sort of tunic. The statue (1940), by Frederic Marès, represents Franco's victory and replaced the Republic (1936), by Josep Viladomat, which was a female nude standing on top of the obelisk rather than in front of it. At the end of the Civil War, the Republic and the tablet that went with it, dedicated to Pi i Margall, were removed and kept in storage. They are now in Plaça de Llucmajor. The local people renamed the obelisk "The Pencil" and the whole centrepiece "The Five of Coins", because formerly it was encircled by four street lamps, and from above it depicted the same pattern as this card in the Spanish pack. A bookshop a few metres away still keeps this nickname alive. (...)

Section 3. From Passeig Sant Joan to Plaça de les Glòries
A Wallace fountain and the founders of the Marists. On the side of the Diagonal facing the sea, on one of the prepossessing little triangular traffic islands to be seen along its length, there is a Wallace fountain, so called because they were a gift from the American philanthropist Richard Wallace for the 1888 Exhibition in Barcelona. Each fountain features four caryatids, the water flowing from the middle. At the foot of the fountain, of which there are six dotted around Barcelona, there is a plaque in remembrance of the founder of the Marist Brothers, Marcellin Champagnat, with the legend, "To educate a child, you must love him." In front of it stands the imposing volume of the Marist school.
Casa Planells. On a cramped plot formed by the Diagonal and Carrer Sicília stands Casa Planells, which includes a number of duplex apartments and is said to have been a brothel in its early days. It was designed by Josep Maria Jujol (1924), and some art critics regard it as the swan song of Modernisme.
The Dogs' Convent. Diagonal, 269. On arrival at Carrer de la Marina we encounter one of the schools erected by Josep Goday in one of Barcelona's educational heydays: Ramon Llull School (1918). Its sgraffito decoration is still today a fine example of an interesting architecture. For many years the school was known as the Dogs' Convent, because it was built on the site of an abandoned religious building where stray dogs roamed.
The mural of fame. The year 1992 was a leap year. February 29 was the day chosen to inaugurate a huge mural showing 26 famous people from Picasso to Mercè Rodoreda, painted by the group Cité de la Création, from the French city of Lyons. It covers 450 square metres of ugly partition wall, the entirety of the wall separating the Diagonal from Carrer dels Enamorats.
Bellcaire flea market. The present site of Plaça de les Glòries used to be called El Camp del Sidral; railway lines crossed the waste ground, and it was the scene of a murder or two. In 1928, the Encants - the flea market - were moved there from Sant Antoni market. The market is also known as Bellcaire Fair, and is now pending another change of venue. Until such time as this happens, the market is a great place to take a stroll and try and find that special something that would look just right in your home.
Plaça de les Glòries. The redesigned Plaça de les Glòries was opened in 1992, to the complete satisfaction of no one. The inside of the huge roundabout is occupied by gardens with 12 vertical black slabs celebrating various "Catalan glories", after which the square is named. There is also a curious monument to the metre, raised on the occasion of the bicentenary of the measurement of the meridian between Barcelona and Dunkerque, which was used to determine the exact size of the metre. It was made by the French sculptors François Scali and Alain Domingo, and was given to Barcelona by the City of Dunkerque.

Section 4. The new Diagonal
Philip Stanton's mural. In February 2001, on the plot formed by Carrer Badajoz and Carrer Ciutat de Granada, the American artist Philip Stanton painted a mural 340 metres long showing various aspects of Barcelona, particularly the future skyscrapers that Jean Nouvel is to build on this exact site. As the mural will be there for at least a couple of years yet, it is worth mentioning on this tour.
Vapor de la Llana. When the Diagonal was opened up to meet the sea, in February 1999, it revealed Vapor de Llana, a brick factory dating from 1863 and also known as Can Jaumandreu. Its chimney, in the shape of a frustum, gives it great personality. The factory stands on the intersection of Rambla del Poblenou, the Diagonal and Carrer Bolívia, and now houses the offices of Barcelona Activa, a municipal business incubator.
The copper fountain. The Diagonal ends suddenly at the doors of a shopping centre which, if all goes according to schedule, will open in November this year. Alongside this, the avenue is fastened as if by a high-quality clasp, the copper fountain (1990), an attractive monumental fountain set in the middle of Rambla Prim (...).

Memoirs and articles
Although not quite in the same class as other famed Barcelona streets such as the Rambla and Passeig de Gràcia, the Diagonal has also had its narrators, who have recorded their impressions in books of memoirs, newspaper articles and commissioned books (...). Pere Calders made an incursion into the city in Veure Barcelona (Seeing Barcelona) (1984), from which we reproduce the part in which he talks about the Diagonal. And just days before the inauguration of the opening up of the New Diagonal, the tireless journalist Sempronio wrote an article in La Vanguardia entitled "The unwettable Diagonal" (10 February 1999) (...).

The barely trodden Diagonal
Pere Calders
Veure Barcelona
Destino, 1984

Its name is so definitive, so exact, that the changes of name plaques dictated by political and social events have never affected the popular consciousness. It divides the city diagonally into two very equal halves, and this undeniable fact made the name stick for good in the minds of the local people.
The Diagonal is one of the city's most significant urban frontiers. The grid system traced by Ildefons Cerdà broke down on arrival at this point, partly because it came up against the highly established and consolidated town of Gràcia. The city grew in the same way as certain voracious insects which, when they meet an obstacle, if they can't overcome it, turn elsewhere. It extended gingerly in the direction of Sant Gervasi and El Putxet, and more resolutely towards El Camp de l'Arpa. It swallowed up the villages and neighbourhoods it found in its path. These were practically rural, almost heavenly places where people retired to for the summer from Barcelona: Sarrià, Horta, Vallcarca, Vallvidrera, El Guinardó... All this is hard to credit nowadays, but valid testimony still remains in the form of rural homes that have withstood the attack of urban growth. In most cases they owe their continued existence to stubborn clauses in wills, family heroism or the comfortable position of owners who can afford to wait in the certainty that land prices will continue to rise. They belong to an era that was fond of symbolic names. They were often named by the head of the household after his wife, a delicate conjugal tribute.
The Diagonal is our particular expression of a phenomenon that I have observed in other big cities in both Europe and America. It is a broad avenue with dignity and a certain beauty, where everything looks as if were designed to make it comfortable to move on foot or horseback. Yet it so happens that the people of Barcelona have agreed (tacitly, I assume, without holding assemblies on the matter) that they prefer to stretch their legs on other thoroughfares with more human density, more picturesque spots. Perhaps the fact that the Diagonal is the direct route out of the city, the linkup between the eastern and western motorways, has something to do with it (...).
I'd like to stress that these meditations and observations are in no way meant as criticisms of the Diagonal, which sets the pace of Barcelona as a modern city, offsetting the weight of the centuries that we have accumulated here beside the sea. With the wisdom of popular instinct, its citizens regard the line of the Diagonal as the division between uptown and downtown. They are different aspects. Along this great avenue there are a number of examples of contemporary architecture, and even some attempts at skyscrapers, although the differences between the overwhelming American original and the far more modest European versions are undeniable. The Talaia Building is a fine vantage point from which to look out over the city, from the hills to the sea.

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THE NEW DIAGONAL
From Les Glòries to the Forum

In 1999, the development of Avinguda Diagonal from Plaça de les Glòries to Rambla Prim constituted the necessary first step for the definition of the final stretch of this urban thoroughfare. Nevertheless, it was the various different measures taken along its length that have provided it with a personality of its own (...).
This context is one of complex uses, where plans call for co-existence of residential and tertiary industrial utilisation. An area covering 117 city blocks with 3.8 million square metres of cover dedicated to productive activities, 170,000 square metres of public installations and 40,000 housing units. With an infrastructure plan based on a new concept of mobility and of all aspects connected with the management of energy resources.
A number of different interstitial projects and public buildings, such as the Cripta dels Tresors, Plaça de les Arts and the administration building - planned by architects selected through a process of public tenders - will be complemented with others built by the private sector, such as the headquarters of the Barcelona Water Authority, which forms a space connecting the already existing part of Avinguda Diagonal with the new section that will extend as far as the sea front. (...).
The point at which the extension of Avinguda Diagonal reaches the coast is the centre of the projects planned for the Besòs Sea Front-Forum 2004. These projects have a double purpose: on the one hand they are directly linked to the city's morphology, and on the other hand, they aim to provide solutions for substantial infrastructure problems. They are the result of an exercise in synthesis (...).

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From the campus
by Josep Playà Maset
From Caparrós's unexpected departure to Argullol's announced resignation.

The university that boasts the largest student body in Catalonia, the University of Barcelona (UB), and the newest public one, the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), have recently replaced their rectorial boards. (...) In both cases, the change of governing body was provided by current university statutory policy and the outgoing rectors - Antoni Caparrós and Enric Argullol, respectively - could not stand again for re-election (...). Their replacements, however, took an unexpected turn. (...)
Antoni Caparrós, who was nicknamed "the friendly rector", (...) did not withstand the tension created by the electoral process (...). His sudden death, three days after economist Joan Tugores's election as his successor, left the university world with a feeling of emptiness. (...).
On the other hand, Enric Argullol (...) announced that he was resigning from his post without even waiting to know his replacement's name, because he "did not want to interfere in the electoral process" (...).

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Barcelona Forum 2004
Notable number of participants at the 2001 Mercè Festival.

The "Fòrum Universal de les Cultures" (Universal Culture Forum) attracted a large audience during the last Mercè Festival in Barcelona. Various spaces dedicated to the event were placed on Passeig de Gracià, which was closed to traffic, coinciding with the European Day Without Cars.
The popular downtown avenue was divided into four stretches that were dedicaded to different thematic aspects of the Forum; each of them had their own ambiance and programme of activities. (...)
Also, it is worthwhile to look at the presence of the Forum during this year's Barcelona Mercè Festival as an expression of the residents' desire to participate in the community life of the city. (...) Fruit of this effort, (...) the Forum gave full support to the "XV Trobada Internacional per la Pau" (International Meeting for Peace XV) which, during three days in the beginning of September, ubited more than five thousand people of different religions in the Catalan Capital, called together by the Community of Sant Egidio and with the collaboration of the City Council of Barcelona. (...)

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Citizens
by Antoni Capilla

Desideri Díez
The historian of Horta
Desideri Díez knows Horta by heart. Its everyday geography has served him as a source for innumerable books and articles that depict the historical and collective memory of what was once an independent municipality and is now about to celebrate the centenary of its annexation by Barcelona. A celebration that will coincide with the festivities for the Forum 2004. But much as he would like to be, Desideri Díez isn't from Horta. He comes from Castrogeriz, in Burgos province, on the Pilgrim's Way to Santiago, which is still today what Horta was until the beginning of the 20th century: a small town.
(…) Díez's works on Horta have a clear defining feature: the emphasis he places on its farmhouses. "Barcelona had its churches, Sant Andreu its factories; all Horta had was its farmhouses," says Díez by way of justification. Fifty-four farmhouses, to be more exact, which have shaped the history of Horta since the 13th century. It is the history of a very rural community focused on the various associations (the Athenaeum, the Lluïsos and the Cooperative, among others) that stood at the centre of the everyday life of its inhabitants. (…)

Tito Ros
The really local press
The scar left by the ring road as it passed through Nou Barris seems to have healed well. Redeveloped streets, the odd community centre, more parks and a revived social life flourish on both sides of the road, which crosses Barcelona from end to end. A few yards above the procession of cars that cross the district every day, commonplace premises house the editorial office of Ciutat Nord, a modest initiative which has lived through several different periods, through thick and thin, for 10 years: about the same time Tito Ros, the paper's editor, has been involved in the local press.
(…) How did Tito Ros arrive in the local press? By an "almost voluntary stroke of chance". A five-year degree at the Autonomous University of Barcelona first led him to Nou Barris 9, the embryo of what, four years later in 1995, emerged as Ciutat Nord, a publication that spreads its ears and its pages throughout the districts of Nou Barris, Sant Andreu and Horta-Guinardó. Nevertheless, in his marriage with the local press, Ros has indulged in the occasional affair: the period he spent with Ajoblanco, and the Barcelona edition of El Mundo. (…)

Salvador Clarós
Twelve years fighting for Poble Nou
Although Salvador Clarós has only recently been appointed president of the Poble Nou Neighbourhood Association, he has been involved in the neighbourhood movement since 1989, when he was just 29. Twelve years fighting for the neighbourhood. The same years that the Neighbourhood Association has been crying in the wilderness for a nursery, an old people's home, a library, a park… basic facilities for a neighbourhood and a district in the throes of an urban development process that will double its population in just a few years.
(…) But are neighbourhood leaders made or are they born that way? What moves a citizen to give up his free time for the sake of the hypothetical common good? "In my case it was an almost consequent decision. When I was a kid I was always involved in the Christian workers' youth group in the neighbourhood, and I saw community associations as a normal way of life. And then, I've always been convinced that social action is necessary, that there are very important things to be done from within the neighbourhood movement, that you can't just leave decisions in the hands of government bodies," he stresses. (…)

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A self-service cultural store.
by Jaume Vidal

On of the problems which afflict cultural spaces is a style of management that does not usually allow users much margin for interaction. Or, at least, we might say that theatres, concert halls, libraries etc... do not encourage dialogue and conversation, a fundamental stepping stone to the development of culture. Because "Sit here!", "Please be quiet!", "What did you say?", "This seat is occupied", "I was here first", etc... are not really sentences that might be considered part of a cultural debate, nor do they express the pleasure people are expected to get from the interplay between intellect and emotions.
Fortunately, it seems that - even if only in a concealed or understated way - people are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that culture stands halfway between escapist fantasy and academic rigidity. Following that new trend, "Almazen" is an open space and the basis on which its whole programme of activities is structured is a declared intention to become a meeting place for all kinds of people. Located on carrer Guifré, in the Ciutat Vella district, "Almazen" came into existence with the idea to serve as headquarters of the "Ciutat de las Paraules" (City of Words) project and, in that scheme of things, the best way to bring people together was to turn the premises into a meeting place. The coffee shop, open from 10 am to 10 pm, is greatly helping to achieve that goal. But the sentence which appears on the slate board displaying the logo of "cafès Novell" clearly signals that this is not an ordinary bar : "The artist's genius always comes to light, if it is real enough, despite all limitations and the narrow frame within which it has to develop. P.M.". Because, on top of todays's "tapas" menu, the coffee shop's customers are offered today's philosophical reflection.
"Almazen", housed in a building whose façade still shows traces of its former use as a shoe shop, offers his customers a wide range of options. As a sample, the sunday meetings of story-tellers which have brought together people of different nationalities, since this type of cross-cultural gathering is a basic contributing factor to cultural enrichment, and more particularly so in a district like "El Raval". There have also been some exhibitions such as "El libro es el lugar" (The book is the place), which showed the collective work involved in the making of an artist's book. However, over its seven months of existence, one the distinguishing features of the place has been its fostering of artistic work. "Almazen" also operates as a studio in which two artists can develop their creative work simultaneously.
Even though the place is privately managed, it is being financed by public money and the Catalan Culture Institute makes a yearly contribution of half a million pesetas.

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Interview: Juli Capella, Chairman of the FAD
by Jordi Casanovas

Juli Capella wants new winds to blow in the FAD organization.
Architect and designer Juli Capella (Barcelona, 1960) became head of the FAD - i.e. "Foment de les Arts Decoratives" or "Association for the Development of Decorative Arts" - last June, when his name was put forward by the former president, who had just handed in his resignation from the position he had been holding for the last seven years. "I accepted the challenge after careful consideration and on condition that there would not be any other candidate nominated for that post, because I did not want my appointment to be achieved against anyone ", Capella says. In the first quarter of 2002, the assembly of members of the FAD Association will have to confirm his appointment for the following four years.
Among the objectives Capella has proposed to pursue, there is a plan for substantial modernization of the Association. Furthermore, in 2003 - the centenary year of the setting up of this institution -, the FAD is considering the possibility of organizing a "creation and design year" with the aim of providing the citizens with more information about what the Association stands for and the work it is carrying out, as well as probing public opinion in order to find out what people really expect from design and from the FAD association itself.
Capella underlines the uniqueness of the FAD because nowhere else in the world is there any other example of a centenary association which has been specifically working on promoting diverse creative subjects and activities while achieving truly harmonious coexistence amongst all those subjects and activities.

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Pep Montanyès
Some say that without Pep Montanyès the Teatre Lliure wouldn't exist. This may be an exaggeration, but no one can deny that the director of the latest major theatre complex to be opened in Barcelona has managed to put into practice the idea conceived so long ago by Fabià Puigserver. In the words of writer and drama specialist Jordi Coca, Montanyès is "a sort of armoured car that rumbles past difficulties", and he gets his own way "through talent, skill, energy and dedication".