4 minute read
Perspective
‘One of the main complaints of visitorsto Barcelona isthat the city is“too touristy”’
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On tour with Barcelona Architecture Walks, passing the DHUB museum by MBM.
Destination Architecture
Rafael Gómez-Moriana discusses Barcelona’s touristic architecture: new buildings designed specifically to appeal to visitors.
Text Rafael Gómez-Moriana
Photos Sergio Pirrone
Agbar tower by Jean Nouvel.
Barcelona
may be well known today as an urban tourism destination, but it was not always thus. Four decades ago, in the 1970s, Barcelona was a declining industrial port city in which the only tourists to be seen were occasional groups of Japanese Gaudí devotees or hippie backpackers tripping on Dalí. Queues to visit a slowly progressing Sagrada Familia construction site were nonexistent, and Casa Batlló and La Pedrera were covered with soot. Plaza Real was a hangout for junkies, and shantytowns occupied the city’s beaches and hillsides. The picture today is completely different: Barcelona is an internationally recognized urban brand, a gleaming postindustrial city with the same predictable luxury boutiques and hotel chains as any other world-class metropolis. At the same time, however, its narrow streets are so overrun by tourists and its housing so expensive that tourism is perceived by locals, according to a recent survey, as the city’s second-biggest problem after unemployment.
How did Barcelona go from industrial grunge to designer chic in only a matter of decades? The 1992 Olympic Games were a major factor, as were the rise of FC Barcelona and the worldwide popularization of tapas. But repeated visitor surveys show that it is actually the city’s architecture that attracts foreign visitors the most, especially those buildings that represent Barcelona’s modernista era. Predictably enough, an entire industry has formed around Gaudí and his contemporaries, comprising everything from specialized architecture-tour operators and venue-rental agencies for exclusive international business events to plastic trencadís knick-knacks sold alongside fake Barça jerseys in the city’s countless souvenir shops.
Architectural tourism, a branch of cultural tourism, is behind much of this transformation. In the 1980s, at the height of postmodernism, the rediscovery of work by Antoni Gaudí and contemporaries such as Jujol led to the restoration and museumification of some of the city’s most important heritage sites. Furthermore, many new works of architecture were also garnering international admiration in ‘the city of architects’, as critic Llàtzer Moix refers to post-dictatorship Barcelona. It was only a matter of time before a growing wave of architectural tourism would produce a new building type that would surf this wave to full advantage: ‘touristic architecture’.
MediaTIC building by Enric Ruiz Geli / Cloud 9.
Touristic architecture is specifically planned and designed to appeal to a particular way of seeing: to a ‘tourist gaze’, as John Urry called it in his eponymous 1990 book. Becoming increasingly widespread as global tourism grows along with the global media that fuels it, the tourist gaze is the look we practise when engaged in leisurely travel, an activity that heightens sensitivity to our immediate environment. The tourist gaze is especially well suited to architecture, cities, landscapes and other place-making signifiers; the authenticity of place – which can be experienced only through personal displacement – is highly romanticized in our technological society.
The evolution of the tourist gaze follows the mass-cultural development of travel. Historically, travel was the exclusive reserve of the upper classes, as exemplified by the aristocratic grand tour of antiquity. Mass tourism is a product of the relatively recent modernization and democratization of travel that occurred in the late 19 th and 20 th centuries, when mobility, infrastructure and industrial production techniques were revolutionized and labour struggles led to more leisure time for the working forces. Tourism is a quintessentially modern invention that could not have come about without technological and social progress, and without which modern architecture as we know it would not have emerged.
In his 1936 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin writes of ‘the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building’, contrasting sight with the more ‘distracted’ sense of touch by which more familiar buildings are perceived in our everyday lives. Benjamin describes a way of seeing architecture that is conditioned by mass-reproduced media – especially photography – and the notoriety and fame they generate. Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’ is similarly conditioned by a fabrication and reproduction of certain ‘expectations’, especially with respect to authenticity and heritage. The packaging of heritage to make it attractive is precisely what creates the tourist gaze.
Touristic architecture goes one step further, directly forging future heritage. Whereas most heritage buildings were not designed to accommodate tourists but became tourist attractions over time, touristic architecture considers the presence of tourists from the start. As Rem Koolhaas pointed out: ‘Through [heritage] preservation’s everincreasing ambitions, the time lag between new construction and the imperative to preserve has collapsed from two thousand years to almost nothing. From retrospective, preservation will soon become prospective.’ Koolhaas’s ‘prospective’ form of heritage preservation effectively exists already in the form of touristic architecture.
Over a period of almost three decades, Barcelona was a veritable laboratory for touristic architecture, employing it as a means to solve two urban problems: degraded parts of the city in need of rehabilitation and an overly concentrated number of tourists in.
