Barcelona by Robert Hughes

of each block (five thousand square meters) would be built on; the rest would be patio and green space, with at least a hundred trees.
    But many such refinements went by the board, thanks to developers’ greed and graft and laziness, particularly during the long Franco era. The Eixample today is far denser and higher, more chaotic in texture and generally more oppressive than Ildefons Cerdà could ever have imagined. Cerdà designed his standard block with 710,000 feet of built floor space and a maximum height of some fifty-seven feet, later increased to sixty-five. Over the next century developers managed to increase this fourfold, to three million square feet per block; an urbanistic disaster, a fraud on the public, and a travesty of Cerdà’s plan.
    Even so, the Eixample is one of the most interesting urban areas in Europe. It grew very slowly; not until the mid-1870s, when the Catalan economy entered the boom decade known as the febre d’or or gold fever, did the blocks begin in earnest to fill up. By 1872 there were about a thousand residential structures in the Eixample and some twenty thousand people were living in them. Its streets were mostly unpaved strips of dust. There was little storm-water drainage, so that after deluges the water collected in standing pools on its vacant lots, breeding swarms of Anopheles mosquitoes which presented Barcelona with epidemic malaria. In 1888 the report of a sanitary engineer named Pere Garcia Faria made it plain that the Eixample was, from the viewpoint of sanitation, just as bad as the Old City and possibly even worse. The ideal housing had failed through the greed of landlords, who had turned the houses into “veritable slums, in which the Barcelonan family is imprisoned.” Health had caused the demolition of the muralles. But thirty years later, the Eixample was still swept by epidemics of cholera, TB, and typhoid, against which the authorities seemed powerless. And strangely enough—or perhaps not so strangely—the design of the Eixample found only limited favor with those who might have been Cerdà’s backers, the next generation of modernist architects. Some of them, notably Josep Puig i Cadafalch, loathed the New City and made no secret of it, though its buildings are now considered by many to be among its jewels. Puig derided its “sacred monotony”: “nothing equals it, except in the most vulgar cities of South America.” There was much, much more. Everything that would in the future be said against the Eixample’s heirs, from Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, was already said against their common ancestor the Eixample. All critics felt that leaving the planning of a city to Cerdà, a socialist, was a big mistake. And not all the criticisms of its monotony were without justice. What saves the Eixample are its star buildings, and the exhilarating processional quality of some of its streets, notably Passeig de Gràcia. But it is not really a place to walk in, as is the Old City: Its plan lacks the charm of surprise, of urban respiration through changes of angle and scale that the older and more organic cities of Europe provide.
    The three decades after the Burning of the Convents in 1835 were difficult times for Barcelona. The sites of razed convents stayed empty, and there was rarely enough public money to build on spots confiscated by the Mendizábal Laws. The Old City was jammed. The New City was essentially unbuilt. Only the Ramblas had been developed in the previous half century, and this, not Passeig de Gràcia (which had not yet turned into the magnificent boulevard it is today), was Barcelona’s social spine, with its plane trees, restaurants, and cafés. The most important new building on it, which opened with pomp around mid-century, was not far from Plaça Reial, the residential square just off the Ramblas where much of its clientele