The Telenotícies on TV3 aired, a few days ago, a very interesting piece on architecture that reviewed some great projects that would have transformed Barcelona, as we know it today, but which were never carried out. It was explained that, more than 125 years ago, the city could have had a center full of skyscrapers. Buildings of more than 200 meters that would have turned Plaça Catalunya and adjacent streets or Via Laietana into a kind of European Manhattan.
Large constructions such as, for example, the Sellés Miró tower (130 meters high and 30 floors) that two American architects designed for the space of El Triangle. In this same location, in the 1950s, a Catalan architect, although also trained in the United States, Josep Maria Bosch i Aymerich, designed an even more colossal building: 40 floors and 140 meters high. Both of them came to nothing, supposedly, due to the visual impact they would have had on the urban landscape.
I like this type of past science fiction that involves discovering the Barcelona that could have been. I often also review, with a mixture of fascination and indignation, old images of architecture of the Barcelona that no longer exists and, for example, I play at imagining what it would be like to walk through a Plaça Catalunya where the monstrosity of El Corte Inglés did not exist and, instead, the elegant Gran Hotel Colón had survived. Or being able to have a martini in the wonderful and ephemeral Bar Torino on Passeig de Gràcia. How frustrating to discover all the heritage we had a hundred years ago and it's no longer there!
The most outrageous thing about the matter is that we did not lose it due to a war, a fire or an earthquake but, for the most part, due to the greed of a predatory and tacky bourgeoisie that happily demolished with pickaxe and shovel a good part of what their parents and grandparents had built, replacing these constructions with others of greater size, terrible taste and poor quality that have completely disfigured most of Barcelona's streets.
Not to mention the disastrous additions that in the sixties destroyed the harmony of many modernist and noucentist buildings with the addition of a couple of floors on top, annihilating the original decorative elements, as if they had grown a cyst or a tumor. One of the most regrettable cases is that of the addition that in 1962, with Porcioles as mayor, was allowed to be made on the Casa Emilia Adrià (Paseo de Gràcia corner Aragó), a colossal botch that spoiled not only this 19th-century building, but mainly the view of the property next door, Antoni Gaudí's Casa Batlló. You can't tell me that's not a developing country.
In short, it is clear that Barcelona has become too small for us decades ago. We need more space. More apartments and more offices are needed –we already have enough hotels–. The thing is that seeing the piece I was telling you about the Barcelona that could have been, a light bulb went off: it's the skyscrapers, stupid! Could these large constructions have solved some of Barcelona's main endemic problems? I am not an architect, but offhand it occurs to me that by putting hundreds or thousands of new homes on the market, many Barcelonans could have been prevented from having to live outside and make long commutes to go to work every day. Even, if one did not want to start building towers in the middle of the Eixample, a new residential neighborhood full of skyscrapers could have been built from scratch in 22@ or in the Fòrum, as most large metropolises have.
I don't know if you have noticed, but in Barcelona, additions are still being made –not as regrettable as those of the Porcioles era, but additions, after all– and, every now and then, a small building from the first half of the 20th century is demolished to build another one somewhat taller and often uglier in its place. Wouldn't it have been smarter to build some skyscrapers here and there than to disfigure our architectural heritage in this way? Wouldn't their landscape impact have been smaller and more concentrated? Ah! And, of course, it cannot be that the Sagrada Familia, once finished, with its 172.5 meters high, must be Barcelona's glass ceiling.