There are cities, there are metropolises; then there's Barcelona. Though that sounds a bit fawning – or like it came from someone who has Drunk The Vermouth – letting the following image wash over your retinas it's hard not to see where the Catalan Crowd are coming from.
Posted to Reddit on Wednesday, the image soon started trending. At the time of writing it has 83.1k upvotes and 3.1k comments, clearly resonating with travel lovers, Hispanophiles and cool picture lovers all over the world.
Ironically enough it was posted by a Reddit user whose username is u/madrid987. Perhaps a grudging show of respect from the nation's capital?
[caption id="attachment_296555" align="alignnone" width="640"]
Image via Reddit[/caption]
"There’s cities, there’s metropolises, and then there’s Barcelona," u/madrid987 captioned the image.
Members of the r/pics community were quick to shower Catalan architect, Idelfons Cerdà (who had the vision and the diplomatic skills to implement Barcelona’s iconic grid layout in the 19th century) with praise.
"The City Planner in Barcelona is a final boss," one wrote.
"Way ahead of his time in city planning. His grave gives a hint of his impact," wrote another.
"Wow he was doing this in the 1800s. Not even today planners are this good."
Giving up his career as a civil engineer, Cerdà ran for Parliament in order to enact his Barcelona-vision on a higher plain.
According to Type 7, “In the mid 1850s Cerdà… wins a seat in Spanish Parliament, and gets to work. He drafted groundbreaking legislation that would enable the government to have the power to radically alter the face and shape of the city, and in 1859 he revealed his plan to reshape Barcelona forever."
After a revision or two the polymath convinced his fellow politicians to put his plan into action, inventing a new word in the process: “Urbanización”. The rest is history.
Let's not forget Gaudi either – the architect who came to define Barcelona's architecture in 1878 with such icons as the Sagrada Familia and Parc Güell.
Speaking of the Sagrada Familia, one Reddit user provided an interesting insight into why it's taking so long to finish.
In response to the remark, "Trying to finish that church is Barcelona’s final boss," they wrote: "I think it's interesting that the Sagrada Familia is famous for being uncompleted for so long. I mean, it has taken a long time to build, (139 years and counting), but that's not actually a long time for a full sized cathedral."
"Many of them took a couple hundred years to build, and 400 or 500 isn't unheard of. At 150 total years or so, Sagrada Familia is pretty average for a cathedral. We just don't build that many full sized cathedrals these days, so we're not used to how long it takes."
"I wouldn’t never say they Sagrada Familia is taking an average amount of time for a a skyscraper. Just that it’s taking an average amount of time for a cathedral. And despite many modern aspects, Sagrada Familia is still in many ways a traditional gothic cathedral, and much of the work is traditional hand carved stone work and art, which modern tools and techniques can only speed up so much."
Another Reddit user shared some interesting insights around parking. In response to the comment, "I can't believe how few of these courtyards are green spaces," the user wrote: "While I don't disagree, what makes this block structure extremely successful is the ability to park cars in them. Or provide parking decks and parking garages internally."
"These city blocks create the dreamy streetscapes that everyone typically imagines of Europe. However, as an American city planner, wherever I have worked on projects that propose this, it receives insurmountable backlash from communities. Instead of addressing the street with a building facade that's adjacent and accessible from the street and sidewalk, we put a 600-car parking lot there instead."
"Furthermore, our outdated and lazy zoning requires excess parking (it's only full on Black Friday which may not be as big in the future) and building setbacks. We love to build cities that we hate living in. My bitterness aside, decades of poor planning policy and public distrust in the government and developers is making it incredibly difficult to correct because anything that's proposed is automatically viewed negatively."
Another commented: "I took a planning class as an elective in college. The big takeaway was that city planners are ignored for a living."
All we can say is if that's what it takes for our cities to look a little more like this, we'd happily trade Australia's power tools for dreamers and scalpels. Who knew? The key to immortality is making your work so complicated it can never be finished!
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The post Heart-Stopping Photo Proves Why Barcelona Is An ‘Immortal City’ appeared first on DMARGE.
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