Gas Natural Tower

The Gas Natural Tower is one of the most unusual and innovative buildings in Barcelona. The Tower's cutting edge asymetrical design was the brainchild of Catalan architects: Enric Miralles and the Italian architect Benedetta Tagliabue. It features in our list of Barcelona's Most Controversial Buildings".

Gas Natural Tower

Its aggressive, design might make it seem ugly for some people, but from every angle it is an extraordinary visual spectacle worth seeing.

The new building of the company Gas Natural, aims to create a contrast between the urban landmark in the skyline of Barcelona, and the low-rise houses of the neighborhood but also to generate quality public spaces, its constructible volume, the singular character of this new building, in relationship with the urban periphery makes the new office building of Gas Natural a very contemporary building. However this doesn’t mean the new building lacks desire to become compatible with its urban surroundings; the small scale of the district of Barceloneta, or the surrounding houses and the park. 

The most interesting thing about the construction lies in the fragmentation of the constructible volume into a series of constructions that at the end form a unified volume, which responds to different scales and in clear relation to the nearby apartment buildings. By forming a great doorway which allows the opening up of the district of La Barceloneta and a singular public space that brings the construction to the ground, until it forms an urban landscape of different dimensions.

The continued closure of the facade is a glass curtain wall that unifies the whole, composed of different windows that give a dynamic aspect to the construction and metamorphic. The treatment of the facades follows similar criteria. The series of large windows create interest close up, while an indifferent volumetric treatment protects the building from the sun and the noise and shows a series of abstract volumes that confuse with the other buildings along the periphery.

PRBB Building

PRBB building

Right next to the Hospital del Mar, we can see Street Doctor Aiguader number 88, where there is a huge U-shaped building, a conical and elliptical. It is the PRBB (Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona), an enormous infrastructure opened in 2006, due to an initiative of the Government of Catalunya, the City Council and the University Pomepu Fabra, built by the architects Manuel Brullet and Albert de Pineda, both experts in public buildings. PRBB brings together six public research centers that are coordinated with each other, which has around about 1,100 employees, making the park one of the largest biomedical research centers in southern Europe. Its park is one of the largest biomedical research centers in southern Europe.

It is a large building partially covered with red cedar from Canada, which controls the effects of light which comes from the outside and which also lightens the structure. Because of this and due to its height and its stair outside structure, everyone that sees it is surprised by its 35,000 m2 on a plot of 7,000 m2. So we have a very modern and functional building, allowing a dynamic space.

It is with buildings like this, that we can see the will to provide the Barceloneta area with innovate buildings that manage to give the place a more modern identity.

Somorrostro quarter

Hospital del Mar

We walk past the Hospital del Mar, one of the main hospitals in the city. The place where now there is a modern building, one of the pioneers in research hospitals in the twentieth century it housed one of the slums of Barcelona, called the Somorrostro.
 

Somorrostro (1950-60)

The huts were on the beach between what was the old Hospital of Infectious Diseases and the now defunct gasworks Lebon Poble Nou. This quarter of baroques extended to the Bogatell stream.

It seems that Somorrostro is mentioned as from 1882, but its use was not effective until 1914. In 1915 there were some 1,400 cabins, with about 18,000 inhabitants. There is a theory that the name comes from Somorrostro, the traditional name of a Biscayan Village, which could have been carried by Basque fishermen who may have settled in the neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century.

Somorrostro (1950-60)

A large part of barracks had no running water, no electricity, no sewage system, there were some very poor living conditions, and often the sea flooded homes. It was also used as a rubbish dump.

At first, these districts also had schools, dispensaries or utilities. The shanty had to fight hard to improve the harsh living conditions.

The neighborhood disappeared in 1966, coinciding with the visit of Francisco Franco in Barcelona to see naval maneuvers. At first the people were taken to the homes of the Home Building Association, however, had to be years until they started to become estates to rehouse all the inhabitants of these huts and often new buildings were built in a hurry with disabilities, and remote and poorly connected, as Prat de Llobregat Trinidad. So the inhabitants of the slums instability lasted for three decades until they began to be integrated neighborhoods in the city.

Somorrostro's demolition (1965)

Most people in the shacks were immigrants who arrived between 1950 and the late 60's from all over Spain and inland Catalonia. The huts arose spontaneously, built by the same people who arrived in the Catalan city, were not home. These huts were spread along the coast, the hills and the empty lots. Their inhabitants were workers and integrated into urban life, but lived in the neighborhood unattended. For years they lived supporting repressive measures and discrimination, and living with the fear that their homes could be destroyed.

These years were very hard times, but it seems as if the city had chosen to forget maybe because it belongs to a problematic episode in its continuous evolution.

Barceloneta's baths

We are on the beach in San Sebastian, one of the many beaches of the city, crowded by tourists and by the inhabitants of the city. At the end of this beach is the W Hotel, known as the Hotel Vela due to its shape that resembles the sail of a boat. It is a new building built in 2009 and designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill. In a beginning, it was expected that both the building 170 meters high, however, the project was not approved because this work would change the skyline of the city of Barcelona, ​which is led by the Holy Family. Thus, the final height is 99 meters. This hotel has quickly become an icon of the skyline of Barcelona's coast, giving the image of modern, cosmopolitan and glamorous voluntarily and breaking the antithesis of local guard behind a poor neighborhood loaded history and tradition.

St. Sebastian baths (1928)

Thus, returning to the beach itself, even in the summer becomes full of people who enjoy the sun, sand and salt water. However, in the early twentieth century, in this space we could found called Baths and the Casino in San Sebastian. The first bathhouses are dated from 1840 through the construction of the breakwater that isolates the beach port. Then, gradually they started to build: Oriental baths, The Shipyard and the Barcelona Swimming Club (1907).

During the first decades of the implementation of the liberal state, the Barceloneta become a place for a Catalan middle class which started to develop the practice of sea bathing and frequenting the beach. From this period we have identified about a dozen new bathroom facilities, not only for Barcelona and its surroundings, but also the summer of the first groups in the Maresme region, such as Caldetes.

In Barceloneta, after the disappearence of the bathrooms of the House of Charity because of construction on its solar factory La Maquinista Terrestre i Marítima, in 1856, the baths of the Shipyard were constructed at the end what was the National road (now Paseo Juan de Borbon).

Advertisment (1920)

These first establishments responded to a type of building that later had a long continuity until approximately the early 1920’s. Usually rectangular buildings which, though simple, were neoclassical features. Were usually buildings with a central body that served as the lobby and reception. They had two wings, one for men and one for women, with their suite rooms and often had a portico (stone or wood, depending on the situation) with open sea views. Some might have two floors and a pool, central garden, rest areas, restaurants, and other wardrobe. First built in neoclassical style, but later innovated a neo-Arabic, Moorish and neo-modernist.

Soon they began to incorporate facilities for waves. The demands to open the bathing huts dismantled on the beach of Barceloneta, were becoming more numerous, so the Municipality of 1856 had to regulate the practice but they forced separation of sexes, bathing suit, ensure the safety of swimmers, etc.

In Barcelona they have found a dozen new projects of spas, of which half were actually built. In addition to these permanent establishments they have also found references to requests for mobile stalls that are assembled and disassembled every summer.

Barceloneta's beach nowadays

However, in Barcelona, as in other parts of the Catalan coast, there was a lack of investment to maintain these traditional premises which slowly began to become obsolete and threatened by coastal speculated projects, especially in the era of the '60s boom linked to coastal tourism. 

For this reason, most of these local spas began to close in the late '60s and '70s, and very few survived until the early '80s.

Nowadays it is very different, at the beaches there are no longer places were people can change, so everyone brings theirs swimming suits etc. from home. Also there is no separation between men and women and there are even nudist beaches.

The bars

We are at St. Sebastià beach. Today, the beaches of Barcelona are known for its large areas of sand that allows people a place to rest, play and leisure. However, this has not always been like this. Until the mid-eighties, Barcelona had a kind of barrier between the city and the sea, which was constituted by the bars or merenderos and sheds.

"Xiringuitos"

At that time Barceloneta began to leave behind its history as an industrial and fisherman district, and began to focus on entertainment with baths and food,. It is then when they began to hear about a project called Plan de la Ribera (Plan Parcial de Ordenación Urbana de la Ribera de Barcelona). It was a large project that anticipated the redevelopment of the maritime façade of Barceloneta. This project did not please the neighborhood residents who clearly opposed.

People having something to drink

Despite this local revolt in 1985 ended this plan was approved, which called for the disappearance of factories like The Machinist and the redevelopment and regeneration of the urban planning of the neighborhood.

The most radical change, however, was the demolition of sheds, the bars and baths, between 1986 and 1992. In return, they opened new areas such as the Moll de la Barceloneta. This caused the decline of the neighborhood, as they destroyed the economic center of the neighborhood, which was devoted to leisure, and now would be forced to focus on the tourism sector.

In relation to the demolition of stalls and merenderos because of the Coastal Act of 1988, there is controversy regarding the new W Hotel. It is a building located within 20m of the sea, something prohibited by this law. However, the owners of this hotel play with advantage, as the building is built in the grounds of the Port Authority, where it can be built on land reclaimed from the sea, but that means that they have privatized land which belongs to public domain. However, the law states that you can only build port facilities.

W Hotel

The controversial part of the traditional legislation (in the sense that the old bars have gone to ground, but a five star hotel is permitted) has also become a controversy over social image. Some argue that the situation of this hotel is not random and that is has been built in an area that, slowly, had been transformed into a nudist beach, and that was an area frequented by homosexuals, so it seems that the building has been placed there to prevent this and to give the beach a modern look.

Beyond these controversies, the polemic doesn’t end there. Critics of this hotel are not few: surfers and environmentalists argue that the resort changed ocean currents due to the extension of the breakwater that also changes the winds, which doesn’t allow the use of Catalan skate or windsurfing.

El Bierzo's bar

Today, when you walk by the beach, you come across a lot of bars with loud music that, rather than a beach, give you the feeling of being in a club. Older establishments that used to offer only sandwiches, fresh cans and chips, have recently become authentic modern beach clubs. Now it is full of small establishments with simplistic shapes, lights, colors, tropical plants and modern music which seek for the attention of those who pass by. And In order to satisfy customers, they have expanded dining menus and developed their different services to provide the most innovative facilities in order to attract people and beat the competition.

House quarters

We are now in San Miquel street, one of the many streets of Barceloneta. When you walk inside the neighborhood, you come across with the legendary quarter houses. These houses were designed as single family homes, to accommodate all those people who had lost their property by building the Citadel.

These constructions were initially of a single storey, about 66 square meters per floor, and were arranged in groups of 8. As far as population was growing neighborhood, the houses were transformed in order to accommodate more residents, the owners saw the opportunity to get a higher economic performance.

Later it began to expand dividing what had been originally a single House, split in two. Moreover, the owners began asking to raise more plants, so that in 1839 authorized the construction of a third floor was authorized. In 1858 Barceloneta was no longer of military jurisdiction, it now belonged to municipal jurisdiction, which started in charge of urbanistic issues. In 1868, the town hall authorized to add a third floor, although many had already been built illegally, and in 1872 it finally gives permission to build four plants. These were also divided with a wall due to the continuous residential pressure. This is why they calle them "quarter houses". They are between 28 and 35m2, which, apart from the problem of small size has the added problem of difficult access to the upper floors. Since 1953, with the new ordinance, they are allowed up to seven floors.

The result is that, for most of the twentieth century, Barceloneta becomes one of the most dense in terms of population. Since the height proportional to the width of the streets of the initial project has been completely lost, it also becomes a neighborhood with very poor living conditions for its inhabitants, because the buildings are much more higher then they should be, so it prevents light from entering the lower floors. Later, and due to the densely populated neighborhood, around 1970 residents began to demand improvements in housing conditions.

It is quite interesting to see, however, how things have changed until today. While the district continues to be in poor conditions, its location next to the sea and its natural charm have made it a neighborhood where apartments are very expensive. Renting an apartment could cost around €850.

Barceloneta's Market

Barceloneta's Market

When we start to get into the streets of Barceloneta, we arrive to the Poeta Boscà square, where we find the market of la Barceloneta, our first stop.

Since its beginning it has been a predominantly fish and seafood market designed by Antoni Rovira i Trias, and was officially opened in 1884. In 1939 thouht it wasseverely damaged by bombing during the Spanish Civil so the roof had to be rebuilt.

From its very beginnings, it has always had a particular maritime and fishing character due to the district in which it is situated. Originally, it was an open air market situated in the Plaza de Sant Miquel.

The recent building is the result of the renovation done between 2005 and 2007 by the Barcelona Municipal Market Institute (IMMB) according to plans drawn up by JosepMiàs, the right-hand man of the now deceased EnricMiralles who, along with Benedetta Tagliabue, helped design the Santa Caterina Market. project was done with the objective of it  becoming a powerful commercial, architectural and gastronomic point of referenceThe new plans designed preserved the market's original 1884 iron frameworkand its original structure.Also as part of this renovation; solar panels were installed on the market's roof which now generates some 40% of the market's energy consumption.

The opening ceremony was very emotional because they commemorated and the 70^thanniversary of the bombing of the Civil War:

“Durante el emotivo acto de inauguración, el alcalde destacó y agradeció "a las personas que han hecho posible este acto simbólico, los vecinos de la Barceloneta", y recordó la fatídica fecha del 16 de setiembre de 1938 cuando "34 personas murieron por los bombardeos y otras 124 fueron heridas en este sitio, hoy hace 70 años".

Durante la inauguración, también participaron el delegado de Cultura, Jordi Martí, y la concejala de Ciutat Vella, Itziar González, ante la presencia de vecinos del barrio, prensa y otras personalidades, como el presidente del Grupo Municipal d'Esquerra, Jordi Portabella.

La Comisión de la Memoria Histórica de Barcelona, presidida por el delegado de Cultura, Jordi Martí, aprobó la colocación e inauguración de una placa recordatoria del bombardeo sobre el barrio y el mercado de la Barceloneta, el 16 de setiembre de 1938, en el 70.º aniversario de los hechos.” (Ajuntament de Barcelona)

With its 2.670 square meters, the market offers new services and infrastructures: a car park, domestic deliveries, new drainage and lighting systems. In addition to this, it also has an attic floor, serving as a meeting hall for all types of events.

The new market is air-conditioned and has two underground floors accommodating the unloading bay. There are all kinds of establishments: eight fish stalls – reflecting the maritime character of the neighbourhood - eight butchers, four fruit and vegetable stalls, a salt fish stall, a frozen foods stall, one serving vegetables and take-away cooked dishes, two bars and five nonfood stuff stalls.

History of la Barceloneta

Barceloneta's evolution

We start our tour on Barceloneta’s metro station. This is our starting point, and is a good time to introduce ourselves to the neighborhood that we are going to visit. So that, we are going to begin with its origins and history. 

The triangular territory were the Barceloneta is situated was assented on false grounds which appeared with the construction of the harbor breakwaters which generated the sedimentation of land and sand prominent from the Besos river.

The demolition of the old quarter of the Ribera for the construction of the military fortifications of the Citadel led to the demolition of many buildings. This prompted the need for new housesso people decided to install themselves over the sandy harbor in barracks built with all kinds of materials forming a "labyrinth of huts." Later, the redevelopment of these lands led to the construction of the Barceloneta and all those old huts were replaced by new blocks of buildings. On February 3^rd of 1753 took place the laying of the foundation stone of what would be the maritime district of Barcelona which was designed by the military engineer: Juan Martin Cermeño who wanted to end the disorganization of the constructions on the harbor and built more houses for people.

Soon after the inauguration, it became a district with a strong sailor character, where they also organized many activities related to the port and the sea. In fact, in the twentieth century they began to spread water sports on the port: the Athletics Swimming Club and the Barcelona Swimming Club were the most active. The latter club promoted, along with athletes from Badalona and New Town, skate sailing regattas.

Aereal view

It also became one of the leisure areas of Barcelona. The first baths were important, they were built in the early nineteenth century, and the success was so great that they keep adding stores, including the Oriental baths, baths The Shipyard, the St. Michael and San Sebastian, many of which survived until the late eighties of the twentieth century.

Gastronomy is also part of its essence. Now and then, you can see small restaurants everywhere. In fact, on the beach there used to be many merenderos, because some fisherman used to offer fresh fish fresh, so they survived and later converted to the bars of Barceloneta, until they disappeared in the 90’s.

Layout of the historic center.

Carmeño presented a project which was based in long, narrow islands that ended in a central square where they would locate the most outstanding buildings of the neighborhood. The streets opened at both ends, providing more access options. While looking for a parallel orientation of the streets with the port in order to provide a greater shelter from the wind.

Each island was divided into ten houses, consisting of ground floor and one floor with a centered door and two side windows on the ground floor and the first floor, a central balcony and two side windows. The building height was proportional to the width of the street, so the sun was always guaranteed throughout the building facades and apparel decoration.

The Barceloneta urban layout has been considered one of the finest examples of Baroque peninsular urbanism. The will to fight against the natural unhealthiness of those lands and make them livable was reflected on the sunshine of the streets with the minimum height of the houses, and the fact that the narrow rectangular blocks of houses were oriented north-south, sheltered from the east wind, allowed all rooms have windows on the outside and therefore cross ventilation between the two facades.

Introduction

F. Bortheiry and A. Closa
The city and the urban world
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Curs 2012-2013


 
Barcelona, from its earliest days, has been a dynamic and constant changing city. Its complex urban form is the result of hundreds of years of inhabitation and constantly changing planning and design practices.

Barceloneta, one of its most ancient seaside neighborhoods has also suffered from all these changes.

At the beginning it was a small fisherman’s district that slowly developed (in the nineteenth century) into an important industrial place with big factories which have now disappeared and turned into sports centers or other educational institutions. 

Now it is more known for its beach and its bars and restaurants which attract people from all places who want to come and enjoy all its leisure facilities, such as: good food, water sports or just chilling at the beach.

In what refers to its urbanistic planning, the first houses that were built were nothing compared to what we see today. They were detached with only one floor and access to two streets so that they had optimum light and ventilation. Over the years, this structure has disappeared and now we only find high buildings which have been constructed over the original ones, and that have been divided. That is why today they are known as “house quarters”.

With this essay, our aim is to show the development of the Barceloneta going through a quick view of how it was then and how it is now. The best way to understand its history is by going on a trip and exploring from the very inside of this district toward the beach, one by one all its historic places and also those modern buildings that offer its now modern identity.

Tour map:

 

o      0. Metro Barceloneta: History

o      1. Pl Poeta Boscà, 1: Market 

o      2. C/ Sant Miquel: House quarters

o      3. Platja Sant Sebastià: Bars (xiringuitos/merenderos)

o      4. Platja de Sant Sebastià : W Hotel (baths)

o      5. Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta, 25: Hospital del Mar (Somorrostro quarter)

o      6. Carrer Doctor Aiguader, 88: PRBB

o      7.Carrer Doctor Aiguader, 38-54:  Gas Natural Tower