RAISING BARCELONA : The Catalonia Capital Gets an Olympian Face Lift From the World’s Leading Urban Planner

WHEN BARCELONA WAS OFFIcially declared the host of the 1992 Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland, on an afternoon in October, 1986, grown politicians cried. Since the 1920s, Barcelona had tried for the Games three times, even attempting a counter-Olympics in 1936 to protest Hitler’s Games in Berlin. This time Mayor Pasqual Maragall and other officials returned triumphantly to an airport jammed with exultant citizens and rode into Barcelona in a midnight cavalcade of honking cars. Fireworks lit the sky; champagne erupted.

But the officials who were so moved at the good news had in mind something a little more complex, and a little more interesting, than simply playing host to the world for 16 televised days. Staging the Olympics has meant many things to many cities, but to pragmatic, value-conscious Barcelona this summer, the glory of the Olympic moment, though very welcome and historically resonant, is really secondary. “What is important is not the Olympic Games, but the urban result,” Maragall says.

“Everybody will be on vacation during the Olympics; it’s when they return that counts,” reports Oriol Bohigas, a wiry, white-haired, cigar-stubbing architect who masterminded the city’s Olympic planning. “When the dust settles,” adds Luis Ballbe, a boyish-looking director of HOLSA, the company managing Olympic construction, “we hope the Games of 1992 will be known as the Olympics of Urbanism.” He sits at a desk in front of a detailed, 10-foot-wide map of Barcelona on which extensive, citywide changes, highlighted in black, make the city look like the staging area for a Napoleonic military campaign.

Trophy buildings by trophy architects have conferred grandeur on many Olympic cities, and in Barcelona this July and August, cameras will certainly feature the new domed sports pavilion by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, the high-tech telecommunication towers by Norman Foster of England and Santiago Calatrava of Switzerland, and the basketball arena in nearby Badalona by Barcelona architects Esteve Bonnell and Francesc Rius. Olympic buildings have given the metropolis monuments. But stadiums built for what one official calls “the speed beasts with whom nobody identifies” do not interest the planners of this understated, high-IQ Olympics more than the skateboard parks, built for knee-padded adolescents, over the new below-grade beltway, and the freshly expanded, glassy airport, remodeled to compete with the world’s best.

The real fruits of the Games for the 3 million residents of Barcelona are the $8-billion extra-Olympic improvements throughout the city that may amount to the world’s most ambitious urban redesign of this century and a major statement of the municipality’s belief that the city is both a house that can dignify everyday lives and a cultural and economic magnet. Barcelona’s elected officials have deliberately used the Olympics as a pretext and deadline for accelerating the reconstruction of Barcelona, regenerating a city harshly neglected during 40 years of the Franco regime by redesigning its public spaces and infrastructure. The style is urban: In this traditional city of shop-lined streets and squares, one of the most densely populated in Europe, residents appreciate European urbanism, and the planners worked more to strengthen and extend the fabric of the city than to simply create a gaggle of buildings best suited to postcards. Architecture itself is playing a supporting role to literally pedestrian considerations of where and how Barcelonans can meet and socialize in public spaces. Most of these citywide improvements will be completed by the time the torchbearer runs into the Olympic stadium: 25 years of urban improvements will have been compressed into five.

With the gleam of a bargain in his eye, Bohigas--now Barcelona’s head of culture--explains that the city itself will eventually pay for only 10% of the cost, the balance coming from Madrid, the state of Catalonia and private investments and contributions. The Barcelona Olympics deserves to be the first to make it into the case-study annals of Harvard Business School: The prestige of a single civic event has been cleverly used to leverage massive urban improvements and to stimulate investment. “Everybody is hoping the Games are the beginning of a new economic period, signaling the Europeanization and internationalization of our city,” Bohigas says.

For Barcelona, then, 1993 is at least as important as 1992. To the stadiums, skateboard parks and the newly remodeled airport, add a lengthy list of other enduring post-Olympic improvements: inviting promenades, five kilometers of reclaimed beaches, sewage-treatment plants that make the beaches swimmable, seaside walkways, 20 new hotels, a recreational port, consolidated and expanded museums, community centers, improved surface roads, extensive drainage lines, a convention center, two skyscrapers, many miles of underground service galleries for utilities, and the new beltway partially covered with neighborhood parks. Railroad lines have been relocated and an obsolete industrial area demolished for Olympic housing strategically placed to reopen the beach to a city long cut off from its own shores.

Some of the improvements will serve residents of outlying, poorer neighborhoods, and other improvements will be of value to business people and the culturati flying into Barcelona for an artistic life that is now coming to a boil.

The architectural trophies visible on TV screens this summer only begin to suggest the massive redesign that extends from neighborhood parks to the layout and concept of the whole metropolis--an effort that has turned architecture into a subject of daily newspaper debates, and everyday citizens into architecture critics. Design itself is the medium effecting this change in a city where guidebooks rate restaurants and clubs by decor rather than by cuisine. “Barcelona is a city that sells design,” writes Maragall, observing that the urban improvements will help “launch the name of Barcelona internationally, (and) recover the lost dignity of the urban landscape.”

IN THE OLD COMMERCIAL PORT, RICKETY METAL CABS RIDE AT VERTIGINOUSheights on cables stretched between Montjuic, one of two mountains that bound the city, and the harbor, where the funicular’s two skeletal towers were built for the Universal Exhibition of 1888. The cabs afford the best overview of the impressive changes in the cityscape. For the past several years, large scars of red earth marked the areas under construction, including the beltway that links the three major Olympic zones and the Olympic Village. The ring road ties into existing freeways with a monumental roundabout in the tradition of the famous Hollywood freeway stack--though these roadways circle a huge public swimming pool.

The most extensive Olympic site is the Olympic Village along the beach, where the large, new housing blocks have replaced obsolete factories and pivot the city toward the ocean. This is one of the few times that Olympic housing, normally built in a residential area outside the city, has been placed within an existing city. Two startlingly tall skyscrapers--one bland, the other structurally exhibitionistic--form a gateway between the city and sea. At the foot of one, a much heralded goldfish sculpture, designed by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, hovers over his low-rise retail and convention complex.

A second zone in the smoggy distance is an expansive, terraced sports park for tennis, archery, bicycling and pelota, set within a chaotic quarter that grew without organization after the World War II. A third zone, for polo and soccer, is situated in a posh residential area along Barcelona’s longest boulevard, the Diagonal.

The high-wire journey on the funicular ends at Montjuic, the fourth and symbolically most important Olympic zone, atop what has been called Barcelona’s Acropolis. The Olympic Ring sports complex rides a crest of the mountain and includes the 1929 stadium, recently updated by the Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti and the Barcelonan Federico Correa. Next to it stands the Sant Jordi sports pavilion by Arata Isozaki, and at the opposite end of the long esplanade, several times larger than Saint Peter’s Square, are the wrestling arenas by Barcelona architect Ricardo Bofill. (Besides the four venues within Barcelona, there are 15 single-sport venues scattered in the city’s outskirts and throughout the province.)

The Olympics Games have not always been salubrious for cities, and ghosts of grandiose Olympics past haunted Barcelona in the planning stages. Montreal’s $1 billion stadium, built for the 1976 Games, drained it financially and ghetto-ized sports. Barcelona instead was inspired by the self-financed 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which made use of existing sports arenas. Like Los Angeles, Barcelona resisted the temptation and pressure to overbuild for the two-week Games, choosing instead to scale sports facilities to post-1992 uses.

“We battled every king-of-the-mountain who thought his sport should have a big stadium, and built instead for what we would need afterward, on Sundays,” says Luis Millet, the soft-spoken director of infrastructure for the Barcelona ’92 Olympic Organizing Committee, who prepared the basic ideas of the Olympic planning. “We expanded the capacity of the stadium on Montjuic to 65,000, not to 80,000 or 90,000. Almost everything was done on a scale that would pay for itself.”

The difference between Barcelona and Los Angeles is that in Barcelona, officials--a small and close group of engineers, economists, lawyers and architects who attended the University of Barcelona at about the same time--used the Olympics as a catalyst for transforming the city. “With its vitality, Los Angeles didn’t have need of the Olympics to change, and its existing urban infrastructure could already handle those 15 days when an Olympic city experiences the logistic demands of a small war,” Millet says. “We learned from Los Angeles to do nothing for the Games themselves, but we also chose to win for the city a lot of economic advantages, new infrastructure and new beaches.

“That doesn’t mean any inadequacy for the Games,” he quickly adds. The Games themselves are self-financed, but changes such as building the beltway, reclaiming the beach and expanding the airport required substantial outside support, which--once obtained--fueled an investment euphoria in the city.

“The importance of putting our house in order for the Olympics, like preparing a house for a wedding, was to catch up with other European cities, to be able to compete with them after the unification of Europe,” says David Mackay, Bohigas’ British-born partner who, married to a Catalonian, has lived in Barcelona for decades. “We hope to be one of its 15 most important cities from a commercial and cultural point of view. The aspiration of Barcelona is to be the most important city of the Mediterranean.” In this provincial Mediterranean port city, planners want to create what they call “capitality”--that monumental, stately quality possessed by Madrid, Paris and Washington for which non-capital cities must strive. Barcelonans believe that, with the unification of Europe, nations will recede in importance as cities emerge, and establishing “capitality” is necessary to become a player in the new Europe.

Barcelona, a port city dating from Roman times on the northwest shores of the Mediterranean near France, was long punished by the central government in Madrid as the capital of the once independent state of Catalonia, and the punishment took the form of restricting the city’s growth. In the 18th Century, Barcelona was forbidden to expand beyond its medieval walls after the province sided with the losers of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the thriving center of commerce grew on top of itself, story after story, the gardens filling in with additions, the space and light growing rare.

In the 19th Century, Madrid relented, and the city expanded with an extensive grid of streets that multiplied the city’s size. A reaction to the old Gothic quarters, the new and clearly planned avenues were broad and tree-lined; the city’s prosperous bourgeoisie decamped here, occupying elaborately decorated buildings that expressed the Catalan cultural affinity to Europe rather than Spain. The new city took after Paris more than Madrid, with street after street of grand facades, often in European or Gothic styles. Modernists such as Antonio Gaudi took brilliant risks--delirious ceramic patterns on warped walls, supported by skeletal columns that lean. It was a brilliant moment of resurgence.

But in this century, after the city took the Republican side during the devastating Civil War, Franco’s central government punitively neglected Barcelona for four decades. The growth of Barcelona in the 1950s and 1960s was left largely to speculative developers with little thought given to schools, hospitals, green spaces or sports facilities; the only public space was that left between poorly constructed housing blocks. Franco was not about to encourage large gathering spaces.

Still, the plans that won the Olympic nomination in Lausanne germinated in the Franco period. “This position of not being able to work on the city gave us the time to reflect, to think of these questions,” Mackay says. “When the moment arrived, we had a reserve of ideas.” Architects advocated more public spaces to encourage a greater civic life in this homogeneous and cohesive society, and they also challenged prevailing notions of shaping a utopian city with sweeping master plans in favor of modest actions tailored to specific sites and neighborhoods. This approach confirmed Barcelona’s traditional emphasis on the small and particular, bred in its tight Gothic quarters, over grand, depersonalizing schemes.

With the death of Franco in 1975, architects suddenly appeared with mayoral candidates on platforms and on ballots. The cumulative neglect of the city turned urbanism and public building into a political issue. “Politicians hadn’t realized that part of their job is to look after the public space,” Mackay says. “It was the first time for at least a century that politicians needed architects.” A vote for the mayoral candidate Narcis Serra several years later amounted to a vote for the planning policy of Bohigas, then director of Barcelona’s School of Architecture. “When the Socialist Party won,” Bohigas remembers, “a policy of strong urbanistic town planning became one of the most important elements in its platform: Barcelona needed public spaces.”

The newly elected Socialist government required fast and convincing results, and Bohigas, director of town planning, proposed spot parks, plazas and playgrounds strategically placed to regenerate neighborhoods. Bohigas accepted the city as it was, identified the most urgent problems and invited a large group of architects, including former students, to find realistic solutions, always in discussion with neighborhood residents. In what was largely an effort of a few individuals, Bohigas was the driving force linking the city and the talent.

The current mayor, Pasqual Maragall--who studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and jokes that after his term in Barcelona, he’d like to become mayor of New York City--likens Bohigas’ approach to that of darning a sock. From 1968 to 1972, 110 widely dispersed “outdoor living rooms” were built where children could kick soccer balls and old-timers could schmooze. These actions in the suburban outskirts suddenly monumentalized “nowhere” places into “somewhere” places that focused neighborhoods. “The small projects were like a fine rain, but at the end it’s a good rain,” Millet says. “In very little time, we gained green space in the battle against the car.” In 1990, Harvard University awarded Barcelona its Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design for these public plazas.

Bohigas called the approach “strategic metastasis,” meaning that a desirable development was implanted at a nerve center of the city where it would generate healthy growth and foster the social cohesion of neighborhoods. It was a process of improving or completing an existing city, based on a typically European assumption that cities are fixed in space, not to be abandoned. During the process, ordinary people came in contact with city officials and architects, and the groundwork was laid for what would be the much larger actions of the Olympics.

In the early 1980s, when interest on the Barcelona’s municipal debt amounted to more than its budget, thinking small was provocative and expedient. Eager to apply this approach on a more comprehensive scale, Serra--who is now deputy prime minister of Spain--looked for a large project that the city could use to accelerate improvements. He decided to compete for the Olympics. Barcelona had already used such outside stimuli. The Universal Exhibition of 1888 and the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 had aggrandized the workaday city with large parks, a subway system, grand museums and fairgrounds.

“They wanted projects that would play a strategic role in the city, and I did a scheme that posed no contradiction or opposition to the city, no displacement of people, no change of structure,” recalls Millet, whose quiet demeanor belies his vigorous role in this urban overhaul. “Had we placed a satellite sports city by the airport for example, which would have been less expensive, it would have opposed the city.”

Bohigas affirms this: “The Olympics had to bring big changes to the suburbs by expanding the order of the gridded city, with its notion of squares.” Bohigas and Millet proposed four points as the principal Olympic grounds, forming an imaginary square on the map and would be connected primarily by a beltway. The strategy was to distribute the Olympics, to tidy the city up at the edges and to balance the richer and poorer sections.

The architects situated the corners of the Olympic square at the beginning of the chaotic outskirts, and the beltway reconfigured districts, revaluing neglected zones and shifting the city’s center of gravity. Barcelona was still darning the sock, but with the Olympics, the holes to be mended could be much larger.

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, BARCELONANS HAVE PATIENTLY ENDURED MASsive amounts of upheaval; at one moment, 170 roads were blocked off for construction. “We’re exhausted,” says Cookie Mila, a multilingual guide and the wife of a prominent designer, who for months had to spend nearly an hour each way, rather than 10 minutes, dropping her young son off at school. But the small-scale darning done on the neighborhood parks in the late 1970s has given Barcelonans confidence about the more ambitious work now taking place, and even about the finances. “It’ll run up debts to the limits,” Mila says, “but it’s like buying a house you can’t quite afford. You trust you’ll find the money later, somehow.”

“No political party has dared criticize, because it would lose the elections,” Bohigas claims. “The Olympics are very popular now.” The new urbanism has already yielded tangible results. Mothers push carriages on the palm-lined beach promenades, and children dart around soccer balls as adults chat on Rambla Prim, a wide new paseo, miles long, running toward the sea through one of Barcelona’s poorer neighborhoods. The generously planted paseo replaces high-tension power lines and a wash that divided the neighborhood, giving public space and social dignity to long stretches of grim postwar apartment blocks. Throughout the city, the beltway is partially covered with tennis and pelota courts, community centers, parking lots and parks. It is a wildly successful recuperation of the space lost and a major lesson to all cities with high-speed roadways that divide neighborhoods.

In an act of curiosity, possession and civic pride, Barcelonans have eagerly inspected several Olympic facilities in a series of public previews. About 300,000 jammed Jordi pavilion for three days during its showing, erupting in spontaneous applause when they spotted its architect, Isozaki.

But if the broad urbanistic strokes are already proving hugely successful, the buildings themselves are not always meeting Olympic expectations. “There is a high level of good architecture but not the shining piece one would have hoped for,” admits Mackay, Bohigas’ partner. “The timing and economics didn’t allow it.”

Bohigas himself expresses some disappointment: “When developers get too much power, city planning becomes a consequence of their financial decisions, and we have problems with such power.”

The high quality of urban planning seems inversely related to the quality of the architectural design. The best works in the Olympics are not located in the most prominent and ceremonial area of the Games, the Olympic Ring on Montjuic. Gregotti and Correa fit the rather dour 1929 stadium with a canopy and expanded the seating by excavating into the field, producing dry results. Bofill’s long, low building for wrestling, the National Institute of Sports, was originally designed for a different site along the esplanade but inexplicably was not adapted to its new home: It obstinately faces the wrong way, and the roof seems too low in comparison to the level of the esplanade.

Even Isozaki (who designed L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art) has not achieved his best effort on Montjuic. The Tokyo architect originally proposed a wistful stadium with an undulating roof, recalling both the sea and surrounding hills, but the design proved unfeasible, given the schedule and budget. Only a graceful, waved canopy that skirts the stadium recalls the original scheme.

A highly controversial telecommunications tower, standing next to Isozaki’s stadium like a minaret by a mosque (its needle is also intended to work as a sundial), is overbuilt for transmission needs and awkwardly sculpted and sited.

On the other side of town, near the beaches, the buildings are handsome but hardly adventurous, for in the Olympic Village and in the adjoining business zone, architects encountered many restrictions. “We wanted to build a modern city while keeping the traditional concept of the square, street and blocks of houses,” explains Bohigas, whose office designed the site plans for extending Barcelona’s 19th-Century-city grid to the sea. Reminiscent of the past while remaining modern, the buildings merge politely into the existing city. But the development used wipe-the-slate-clean, 1960s-style urbanism; razing nearly all the existing buildings eliminated the possibility of adapting older industrial buildings into the new scheme.

Kept from inventing different layouts and building types and unable to creatively integrate old and new buildings, the architects had simply to connect the dots, varying only the surfaces of the buildings rather than concept. The planning established the building envelopes within which the architects had to conform. “A halfway solution,” said one critic.

It is here that tensions inevitable in such a massive urban project are most evident.

“There is nothing insolent or powerful here--no breaks, no risks, nothing even enthusiastic or ambitious,” says Manuel Gausa, editor of the Barcelona-based architecture journal Quaderns. Gausa also criticizes the adaptation of 19th-Century forms for a 20th-Century city with beltways, overpasses, department stores and supermarkets that require radically fresh planning, not a perpetuation of building traditions.

“It was difficult to try anything that wasn’t conservative in the climate that Bohigas established,” according to one architect who designed an Olympic building. “Talent gets murdered: Everybody gave in to the pressures of the intellectual setup, and most are upset at their own work. Nobody could think conceptually.” In this sense, the architecture differs from the adventurous turn-of-the-century Modernista work that draws thousands of visitors.

But Maragall, the mayor-cum-critic, defends the effort as beneficial to the city. “While it’s true that attempts you would hardly describe as artistic have been made to minimize risks, there’s no evidence to show this is necessarily bad.”

Curiously, the conformity in the Village undercuts the presence of Barcelona’s architects in the overall effort, making monuments such as Isozaki’s pavilion and the new Museum of Contemporary Art by New York architect Richard Meier stand out all the more. “The great buildings that will be the points of attraction, and the memory of the Olympics, are being built by foreign architects,” laments Marta Cervello, a member of the College of Architects’ Cultural Commission. “People may ask in 20 years, ‘Were there no architects in Barcelona?’ ”

The most poetic building was almost a throwaway commission--no more than the changing rooms next to two archery ranges, by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos. Long, single-story buildings set into the hillsides of the Vall d’Hebron, the two structures are made of poured reinforced concrete and brick and decorated with deep-blue ceramic tiles. The buildings are a riff of accidental forms arrayed against the hill and seem to free rather than control their parts. One architect complained that this elaborate response to a basically simple program was the equivalent of killing a fly with a cannon. But the lyricism is welcome in a newer part of the city that lacks the romantically beautiful, highly decorated Modernista buildings in the older city.

There are other indications of a fresh spirit in Vall d’Hebron. At the park’s edge stands a two-story-tall steel matchbook in primary colors by Claes Oldenburg, with several of the spent matches tossed across the street. Just down the hill is a reconstruction of the Spanish pavilion done by the expatriate architect Jose Luis Sert at the 1937 Paris Exposition, for which Picasso, who had lived in Barcelona, painted “Guernica.” The painting’s hoped-for return to this building this summer now is not expected to come to pass.

Bohigas, who is credited with having created the climate in which “the fine but good rain” has occurred, is not so concerned about whether the Olympic architecture excels: “For me, architecture is not so important. You can find a nice, livable city where the architecture is not so interesting.” His basic aims have been realized: The Olympic Village, for example, turns the face of Barcelona toward the sea and leads directly to the Olympic port--which Mackay calls a “wet square,” surrounded by outdoor cafes, restaurants and shops--and opens up the beaches flanking both sides of this pleasure port.

Reclaiming a seafront that until recently was a convenient place to dump trash is perhaps the achievement in the overhaul that Barcelonans most appreciate. Now, for the first time, families carrying towels, beach chairs and buckets wend their way through town to the more than five kilometers of sandy beaches that scallop the coastline. “It’s half the size of Central Park,” Millet says, “and before now was inaccessible, cut off by the train, absolutely unknown to us.”

A new palm-lined promenade is already popular with Barcelonans on strolls; the wide guardrails, contoured with ceramic tiles, invite people to lean on their elbows as they ponder the sea. Landscaped parks covering the underground beltway link the beachfront to the rest of the city, including poor neighborhoods that now suddenly occupy prime locations. To their surprise, citizens gazing out to sea are finding that this traditionally introverted city is a Mediterranean resort with an equivalent of Nice’s sea-fronting Promenade des Anglais.

“What’s remarkable and important,” says Richard Meier, indicating with a sweeping gesture of his arms that the changes are all around, “is just the fact they did it.”