After the unappealable approval of the central government, on 4 September 1860,
Queen Isabella II laid the first stone of the
Eixample in the current
Plaça de Catalunya. The growth of the city outside the walls was not rapid due to the lack of infrastructure and the distance from the city center. In the 1870s there was remarkable progress as investors saw a great business opportunity. The return of the
Indianos with the end of the colonies brought important capital that had to be invested and found in the widening of its best destination. The so-called
gold rush began. But the great interest ended up being detrimental to the initial plan, and the construction fever contributed to the progressive reduction of green spaces and facilities. Finally, the four sides of the blocks were built. The
Exposición Universal (Universal Exposition) of 1888 meant a new impulse that allowed the renovation of some areas and the creation of public services. But it would be the great development of the late 19th century with the
Modernism supported by the
bourgeoisie that invested in buildings for rent, which would grow the
Eixample in such a way that in 1897 Barcelona integrated the municipalities of
Sants, Les Corts,
Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, Gràcia,
Sant Andreu de Palomar, and
Sant Martí de Provençals.
The new language of Cerdá The plan provided the primary classification of the territory: the "roads" and the "inter-road" spaces. The former constitute the public space for mobility, meeting, support for service networks (water, sanitation, gas...), trees (more than 100,000 street trees), lighting, and street furniture. The "intervías" (island, block, or square) are the spaces of private life, where multi-family buildings are gathered in two rows around an inner courtyard through which all dwellings (without exception) receive sunshine, natural light, ventilation, and
joie de vivre, as demanded by the
hygienist movements. Cerdá defended the balance between urban values and rural advantages. "
Ruralize that which is urban, urbanize that which is rural" is the message launched at the beginning of his
General Theory of Urbanization. In other words, its purpose was to give priority to "content" (people) over "container" (stones or gardens). The shape, such an obsessive theme in most plans, is but an instrument, albeit of the utmost importance, but often too decisive and sometimes overbearing. Cerdà's magic consists of conceiving the city from the home. The intimacy of the home is considered an absolute priority and, in a time of large families (three generations), to make possible the freedom of all members could be considered
utopian. Cerdá believes that the ideal dwelling is the isolated, the rural. However, the enormous advantages of the city force to compact, the essence of the urban fact, and to design a house that allows it to fit in a multi-family building in height, and enjoy, thanks to careful distribution, double ventilation from the street, and the inner courtyard of the "block". The presence of the sun is assured in all cases. Along the same line, he assigned a key role to the parks and interior gardens of the blocks, although later speculation greatly altered this plan. He fixed the location of trees in the streets (1 every 8 meters) and chose the shade
plane tree to populate the city after analyzing which species would be the most suitable for living in the city. In addition to the hygienic aspects, Cerdá was concerned about mobility. He defined an unusual width of streets, partly to escape from the inhuman density that the city lived, but also thinking of a motorized future with its own spaces separated from those of social coexistence that reserved them for the interior areas. He incorporated the layout of
railway lines that had influenced his vision of the future when he visited France, although he is aware that these have to go underground, and he was concerned that each neighborhood should have an area dedicated to public buildings. although both Cerdá himself and, later, some speculative actions substantially densified it. Cerdà proposed the "
Ensanche ilimitado" (unlimited expansion) a regular and unperturbed grid along the entire urban layout. Unlike other proposals that broke its repetitive rhythm to put green spaces or services, Cerdà's proposal encompasses them internally and allowed to set a continuous repetition in the plan with the ability to alter it when appropriate. Special mention deserves the design of
Passeig de Gràcia and
Rambla de Catalunya, where to respect the old road of Gracia and the natural slope of the waters, hence the name Rambla, Cerdá traced only two consecutive roads of special width where in reality attending to the layout of 113, In addition, the Passeig de Gràcia, to respect the old layout, is not exactly parallel in the rest of the streets, which means that the existing blocks between the two aforementioned roads, although they have an orthogonal design with chamfers, present irregularities that give them the shape of trapezoids. To all this, we must add the presence of some of special characters that do not follow the grid layout but cross it diagonally, such as the Diagonal Avenue itself, the Meridiana Avenue, the Parallel, and others that were designed respecting the existence of ancient communication routes with neighboring towns.
Geometry of blocks The dimensions of the blocks are given by the aforementioned distances between the longitudinal axes of the streets and the same width of these roads, so that by establishing a standard width of 20 meters, the blocks are formed by quadrilaterals of 113.3 meters, their vertices truncated in the form of a chamfer of 15 meters, which gives a block area of 1.24 hectares, contrary to popular belief that they have an exact area of 1 hectare. The figure of 113.3 meters has had various justifications. Manuel de Solà-Morales considers that the 5 blocks between the old bastion of Tallers (now Plaça Universitat) and that of Jonqueres (now Plaça Urquinaona) are the ones that mark the factor from which the rest is built. Cerdà justified the
chamfering of the vertexes of the blocks from the point of view of the visibility that this gives to road traffic and in a vision of the future in which he was not more mistaken than in the term used to define the vehicle, he spoke of the private locomotives that one day would circulate through the streets and the need to create a wider space at each intersection to favor the stopping of these
locomotives. The first generalization of the use of the chamfer or
ochava was given throughout Argentina as a result of the decree of the Minister of Government and later President
Bernardino Rivadavia "
Edificios y calles de las ciudades y pueblos" ("Buildings and streets of cities and towns") of 14 December 1821. Almost 4 decades later it became generalized for the first time in Spain thanks to Ildefonso Cerdá, who had studied the case of
Buenos Aires and its chamfers for the writing of his work "
Teoría de la construcción de las ciudades, vol. 1" (Theory of the construction of cities, vol. 1). Barcelona, 1859 and replicates it in his planimetric design for
Barcelona (1856), known as
The Cerdá Plan, where the chamfers are as long as the conventional streets are wide (20 meters), to allow vehicles to turn without sharp turns, as they go from having to turn at right angles to obtuse ones. In addition, it allowed better visibility of adjacent roads, and had the added advantage of relieving traffic at intersections by giving them an additional surface area. The chamfer was copied by other Spanish urban extensions, becoming widespread in the
Iberian Peninsula. The design of some wider tracks, without disturbing the regular 113.3 m grid, makes it possible to adequately reduce the dimensions of the blocks affected by the widening of the tracks, as is the case of
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, under which the metro and train circulate, Aragón Street, where for many years the railroad ran in the open air until it was finally buried, Urgell Street and others. Within the space of each block, Cerdà conceived two basic forms to locate the buildings, one presented two parallel blocks located on opposite sides, leaving inside a large rectangular space for the garden and the other presented two blocks joined in an "L" shape located on two adjacent sides of the block, leaving in the rest a large square space also for the garden. The succession of blocks of the first type resulted in a large longitudinal garden that crossed the streets and the grouping of 4 blocks of the second type, conveniently arranged, forming a large built square crossed by two perpendicular streets and with its four gardens united in one.
The non-acceptance of the Cerdà plan Already before its approval, it was opposed by municipalists more for what it represented (the imposition from Madrid) than for its content. The Barcelona elites acted against the plan in the same way they were acting against the growing popular protests. The
anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian and rationalist character of the plan clashed directly with the vision of the bourgeoisie who preferred to have Paris or Washington as a reference for a new city with a more particularist architecture. The figure of Cerdá also generated antipathy among architects who could not forgive him for the confrontation that had involved assigning urban planning responsibility to an engineer. Cerdá suffered a personal smear campaign full of legends and lies. It was of no use that he was from a Catalan family originating in the 15th century, nor that he had proclaimed the
Catalan federal republic from the balcony of the
Generalitat de Catalunya, for it to be spread that he was "not Catalan".
Domènech i Montaner claimed that the width of the streets would produce drafts that would prevent a comfortable life. To cope with this, he distributed the pavilions of his
Hospital de Sant Pau in the opposite direction to the alignment of the street. In 1905, 50 years after the approval of the plan,
Prat de la Riba expressed his deep indignation "
against the governments that imposed on us the monotonous and shameful grid" instead of the system he dreamed of a city radiated from the old historical capital.
Evolution of the Cerdà Plan The structure of the blocks The opposition to Cerdà and his Plan by the people of Barcelona facilitated the emergence of speculative activities and arguments that tried to get more built space. The first of them was that if the streets were 20 meters wide, it could well increase the depth of the buildings to the same extent, the central area of the blocks was subsequently occupied with low buildings, destined in most cases to workshops and small family industries, thus disappearing most of the central gardens, so that as a last resort to increase the built land, the two sides already built were joined with buildings that joined them, completely closing the blocks.
Evolution of the building´s height. The "ski lifts" It seemed that at this point the speculative process ended, but a new argument appeared: if the streets were 20 meters wide, there should be no inconvenience for the buildings to have a height of 20 m instead of the projected 16 m, since the increase in height, with the sun at 45º, illuminates any building in its entirety without any neighboring building casting a shadow; this argument, together with the construction of lower ceilings, resulted in a gain of two stories in height. Finally, taking into account the previous theory, if an additional floor is built on top of the current building, but with the façade set back towards the interior of the building by the same amount as the height of this floor, it would increase the built space without the shadow of the building affecting the neighboring buildings if the sun is at 45º; thus the attic floor was born, and by the same theory the attic floor was built, with the façade set back again by the same amount as the height of this new floor. == See also ==