{"id":10906,"date":"2025-11-03T13:07:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T12:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gabarcelona.com\/?p=10906"},"modified":"2025-11-04T11:15:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T10:15:23","slug":"meaningful-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gabarcelona.com\/es\/blog\/meaningful-city\/","title":{"rendered":"The Semiotics of a City: Unpacking the Book \u2018The Meaningful City, Reading Barcelona\u2019s Urban Landscape\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Way to Read, De-Code and Understand What the Buildings and Landscape of Barcelona Are Saying<\/h2>\n
\"\"

Cityscape of Barcelona, \u00a9 Enrico Perini<\/p><\/div>\n

The idea of \u2018reading\u2019 the architectural environment, and of the city as a \u2018text\u2019, is a familiar one. But what does it actually entail? My book \u2018The Meaningful City, Reading Barcelona\u2019s Urban Landscape\u2019, published in 2025 by Palgrave Macmillan, put forward an original approach to reading Barcelona\u2019s buildings, monuments and urban planning, structured around a history of the city over the last 300 years.<\/p>\n

The narrative opens after Spanish military engineers forcibly reshaped \u2013 and re-semanticised – the former capital of Catalunya after its defeat at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, with the construction of the enormous Ciutadella fortress. It extends up to the present day, with numerous actors and agencies competing to impose their perspectives, or priorities, on the contemporary city. It scrutinizes how deep cultural and social changes such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, de-industrialisation and globalisation can be read in the urban environment, as well as the more intentional effects of major urban development projects like the Ciutadella, the two universal exhibitions of 1888 and 1929, the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia, the Barcelona Model of urban renewal and the 22@ innovation district.<\/p>\n

What Do We Understand Buildings to Say?<\/h2>\n

The literature theorist Roland Barthes warned that to try to \u2018sketch a semiotics of the city\u2019 like this would need \u2018a semiologist (a specialist in signs), a geographer, an historian, an urbanist, an architect, and probably a psychoanalyst\u2019. (1) In practice, exploring the city as a conscious act of reading, or de-coding, is exciting, engrossing and enlightening.<\/p>\n

What should one make, for instance, of the two matching towers built around the time of the \u201992 Olympics, one an office block designed by Spanish architects as the corporate headquarters of an insurance company and the other a five-star hotel by Chicago\u2019s Skidmore Owings & Merril?<\/p>\n

\"\"

The matching towers of Barcelona\u2019s Vila Ol\u00edmpica, looking from the sea, \u00a9 Rodrigo Chaparreiro<\/p><\/div>\n

The psychoanalyst could detect contrasting ways in which different people understand them. For local residents, they are part of the genius loci of the neighbourhood, the \u2018spirit of the place\u2019 that they feel living in their shadow. For visitors to the city, they are one of the half-dozen outlines that make up the touristic skyline and what they expect to see when they come in Barcelona, what sociologists call \u2018the tourist gaze\u2019. As for people who may be making location decisions, to start a business, take up a new job or choose a place to invest, the towers are part of the \u2018Barcelona brand\u2019, helping to identify it as a global destination.<\/p>\n

A semiologist would back this interpretation: they were evidently intended to say something particular about the city and this stretch of shoreline. Skyscrapers are distinctive landmarks, traditionally associated with high-value capitalist activities. In the twenty-first century they became favoured symbols of aspiring global cities, often incorporating locally relevant motifs in a search for singularity. The skyscrapers in Madrid known as the Puertas de Europa lean toward each other, and the placing and spacing of the pair in Barcelona does likewise suggest a gateway or entrance. (2)<\/p>\n

Or what of the urban myth that in planning for the Games, the mayor of Barcelona asked his chief urban planner, Oriol Bohigas, for a symbol of a great city by the ocean that would distinguish the new Olympic neighbourhood they were creating. Bohigas is said to have suggested the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan. But this connotation will have altered, too, since the shocking events of 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Changing Meanings With Urban Sculpture<\/h2>\n

Barcelona is of course famous for \u2018re-signing\u2019 itself in this way. The whole transformation of the city during the decade and a half after the first democratic elections in 1979, known as the Barcelona Model of urban renewal, included numerous initiatives which were more semantic than practical. The distribution of contemporary sculpture is a particular example. Notable examples are the Barcelona\u2019s Head by Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Gehry\u2019s shimmering bronze fish beside the Olympic Port, and the tower of dislocated rooms by Rebecca Horn on the restored beaches.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Rebecca Horn\u2019s beach sculpture from 1978, \u00a9 GA Barcelona<\/p><\/div>\n

But sculptures were used to signify the newly egalitarian character the city\u2019s democratic governance. The largely immigrant neighbourhood of Nou Barris gained most from this early policy with at least forty sizable sculptures, including Richard Serra\u2019s El Mur, thought to be the first commission by a foreign artist in Barcelona since the Gothic period. The majority are public art, including pieces by Barcelona artists Jaume Plensa and Xavier Corbero. The presence of works by well-known sculptors throughout the city, including Anthony Caro, Alexander Calder, Eduardo Chillida, Ellsworth Kelly and Claes Oldenburg, express the inclusive attitudes of the Ajuntament, and the cosmopolitan nature of Barcelona. (3)<\/p>\n

What Is the Sagrada Familia Saying About Barcelona?<\/h2>\n

As these examples indicate, meanings change and mutate, escaping the best intentions of their architects and patrons. What about Barcelona\u2019s most famous piece of architecture, the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia, just visible between the two Olympic towers? What does Gaud\u00ed\u2019s great church really mean today, and how does it affect how we understand its city? When started in the 1880s, it was meant to turn the citizens of Barcelona away from violence and anarchism back towards Christianity and Catholic belief.<\/p>\n

This conflict is represented by a remarkable sculpture in the cloister, apparently referencing the Old Testament Fall from the Garden of Eden, of a working man being tempted towards violence by a serpent-like representation of the devil.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A citizen of the \u2018ciutat de les bombes\u2019, as Barcelona was named in the 1880s, \u00a9 Pablo Iba\u00f1ez<\/a>, used under CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

But in place of an apple, he is being offered a grenade. Such a device was thrown into the Liceu opera house in 1893, just four years before the carvings were made, a traumatic event for Barcelona\u2019s elite. No part of the building expresses so explicitly the social anxieties of the bourgeoisie which stood behind the construction of the church.<\/p>\n

The drawings and plaster models that Gaud\u00ed used to design the nave were almost all destroyed in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. When construction began decades later, the architectural system he had devised had to be reverse engineered by the architect Mark Burry, who began to work on the church from 1979 to find a way to continue the project as Gaud\u00ed had intended. Burry worked backwards from the surviving plaster models and photographs to unravel the geometrically-based method of designing the nave\u2019s structure and surface decoration which Gaud\u00ed had devised for the church of the Col\u00f2nia G\u00fcell.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The nave and south aisle of the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia: design by algorithm, \u00a9 Aleksandr Kuzmenko<\/p><\/div>\n

Burry wrote that \u2018Even the decorative faceting is derived from the hyperbolic geometry as combinations of triangular planes bounded by selected intersecting generatrices, the lines (straight by definition) that form the surfaces.\u2019 (4) One interpretation of this mechanistic system for the design of the nave is that Gaud\u00ed had ceded the architect\u2019s creative responsibility to geometry and mathematics. The nave might therefore reasonably be read as a metaphor for blind evolution: forms generated by an algorithm rather than created by a designer took Gaud\u00ed closer to Darwin than he could surely have wanted.<\/p>\n

As it approaches completion, therefore, the question posed by an architect\u2019s association as long ago as 1976, \u2018the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia: For what and for who?\u2019 is both easy and difficult to answer. It is evidently not what it was conceived to be, a vehicle to combat anarchism and the materialist values of the working class. Despite the church\u2019s official name, nor is it an \u2018expiatory temple\u2019, nor the \u2018Cathedral of Europe\u2019 as contemporary defenders try to rebrand it. Is it even still a church? Studies of the motivations of visitors indicate that barely 5% do so for religious reasons, preferring to cite its artistic and architectural qualities. (5)<\/p>\n

The building was coopted by the image-building teams of the city council after 1979, which oversaw an \u2018extensive regeneration project that both reshaped and re-semanticized city\u2019 during the fifteen-year administrations of mayor Pasqual Maragall. (6) Amplified by the instantaneous global circulation of images through mobile phones and social media, since at the end of the century the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia is the dominant symbol and visual metonym of the city of Barcelona, and the meanings associated with its architect, of uniqueness, inspiration and creativity are applied, by extension, the rest of the city.<\/p>\n

How to Represent Innovation in Urban Design<\/h2>\n

Gendered readings of the urban landscape have proved problematical to pin down, but the Olympic towers and the eighteen spires of the Sagrada Fam\u00edlia do contribute to a popular impression of a patriarchal urban landscape, dominated by the verticality of capitalist and catholic constructions. A third skyscraper nearby adds to the connotations of masculinity, the phallic Torre Glories.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A landscape of innovation? The DHub and Torre Gl\u00f2ries, encouraging knowledge spillover, \u00a9 Josep Bracons<\/a>, used under CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Despite the popular anatomical associations, it was intended to have two particular meanings. The architect, Jean Nouvel, claimed it symbolised a geyser erupting up from the ground, with the blues and reds colouring the glass brise soleil all connoting water, the core of his client\u2019s business operations. More generally, this 21st century update to the classic Modernist corporate tower was intended to signpost the location of a new innovation district, dedicated to technology, information and design. Renewing a run-down industrial neighbourhood and re-named 22@, here was Barcelona\u2019s bet on the emerging knowledge economy.<\/p>\n

Although innovation districts have been established in many post-industrial cities, there is not much discussion of how architecture and urban design might facilitate their operation. (7) Most contain new, daring architecture which is expected to express visually the hoped-for dynamic, even those on regenerated industrial districts like 22@. As well as the Torre Glories, the architecture and location of the DHub museum symbolizes the strategic importance of design for the city, while the Media TIC building is a self-consciously experimental architecture intended to reflect the interest in smart city technologies. The overall objective of 22@ as post-industrial urban renewal is represented in the re-use historic textile factories as university teaching and research facilities. Lastly the open spaces between were the test-bed for Barcelona\u2019s pioneering sustainability project the so-called super-illes<\/em>, or superblocks.<\/p>\n

Meanings and Misunderstandings in the Barri G\u00f2tic<\/h2>\n

How architecture expresses abstract ideas about the character of a city and of its citizens is complex and open to misunderstanding. Architectural semiotics recognises the hazard of trying to communicate ideas through material interventions. Cultures evolve and different social groups have different values. The experience of the Barri G\u00f2tic, the restored Gothic Quarter in the heart of the old city is exemplary. Robert Hughes, in his standard biography of Barcelona written in 1992, interpreted the Barri Gothic as \u2018\u2018the most concentrated array of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century buildings in Spain, and, not discounting even Venice, the most complete in Europe\u2019. (8) Within few years, however, a younger group of historians was condemning this same district as a falsification, a theme park, an \u2018invented tradition\u2019 and an example of \u2018staged authenticity\u2019. (9)<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Pont del Bisbe built in 1928 is the most photographed building in the Barri G\u00f2tic, with its theatrical suggestions of Venice, the orient and night-time assignations, \u00a9 GA Barcelona<\/p><\/div>\n

Nevertheless, architects continue to incorporate messages and meanings into their work. The rebuilt Camp Nou, the stadium of the city\u2019s iconic football club which reopened this year, is intended to state in a readable way the values of the club. In 2016 the club approved a project to increase its capacity to 105,000, cover it with a transparent roof and to connect and integrate the stadium with the local neighbourhood. The imaginative solution that the architects came up with involved removing all the exterior walls so that the internal walkways used to access the stands would be opened and turned into esplanades or boulevards. Taking down the barriers and enclosures round the outside would make the stadium the centre of a new concourse or public arena.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Rendering of the remodelled Camp Nou and its surroundings, democracy and transparency written into a football stadium, \u00a9 FC Barcelona<\/p><\/div>\n

The Japanese practice Nikken Sekkei and the Catalan firm Joan Pascual Ramon Ausio Arquitectes identified particular connotations of the club and its home city that they tried to express in this design. Without walls the stadium would \u2018dematerialize\u2019, becoming open, transparent, egalitarian. \u2018FC Barcelona is owned by members known as socis, it is a club for the fans, not for the owners. For that reason, our other big change is to make the transparent roof totally symmetrical to represent this democratic nature.\u2019 (10)<\/p>\n

The imaginative remodelling of the stadium of this emblematic club can be read to represents meanings of the city, too. in the 1850s, Barcelona citizens protested \u2018Down with the walls\u2019, demanding the demolition of the suffocating ramparts maintained by the Spanish military authorities. The remodelled Camp Nou can be read as reasserting meanings of Barcelona that have recurred, ever since the demolition of the Ciutadella fortress, of democracy, equality and the primacy of public space.<\/p>\n

\u2018The Meaningful City, Reading Barcelona\u2019s Urban Landscape\u2019 is in hardback and digital formats, and can be ordered from the publishers here<\/a>, or from any bookseller. More examples of the semiotic messages discoverable in the buildings and plan of the city are in my Instagram posts: @jamesdouet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Text: James Douet<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div>

BIBLIOGRAPHY<\/p>\n

(1) Barthes, R. (1988). The semiotic challenge<\/em> (1st ed). Hill and Wang, 191.<\/p>\n

(2) Vanolo, A. (2018). City Branding: The ghostly politics of representation in globalising cities<\/em>. Routledge, 147-155.<\/p>\n

(3) Lecea, I. de. (2009). Art p\u00fablic de Barcelona<\/em>. Ayuntamiento de Barcelona y \u00c0mbit Serveis Editorials.<\/p>\n

(4) Burry, M. (2013). Scripting cultures, architectural design and programming<\/em>. (e-book). Wiley, chapter 7.<\/p>\n

(5) Marine-Roig, E. (2015). Religious tourism versus secular pilgrimage: The Basilica of la Sagrada Fam\u00edlia<\/em>. The International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 3(1).<\/p>\n

(6) Smith, A. (2005). Conceptualizing city image change: The \u2018re-imaging\u2019 of Barcelona. Tourism geographies<\/em>, 7:4, 408.<\/p>\n

(7) Hubbard, P. (1996). Urban Design and City Regeneration: Social Representations of Entrepreneurial Landscapes. Urban Studies<\/em>, 33(8), 1441\u20131461.<\/p>\n

(8) Hughes, R. (1992). Barcelona<\/em>. Harvill.<\/p>\n

(9) Prieto Gonzalez, A. (2020). Identidadas construidas: Falsificaci\u00f3n monumental del Barrio G\u00f3tico de Barcelona<\/em>. ETSAM.<\/p>\n

(10) Clad News, https:\/\/www.cladglobal.com\/news.cfm\/architecture-design\/Nou-Camp-FC-Barcelona-Barcelona-football-stadium-architecture-Les-Corts-Spain-La-Liga-Nikken-Sekkei-design\/326304?codeID=326304<\/a>, consulted 24\/7\/2024.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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