Barcelona has experienced several stages of transformation that have contributed to defining its personality. In the eighties and nineties, in the preparation and the years after the Olympic Games, the city experienced a creative effervescence that connected design, gastronomy, leisure, and a new way of understanding urban life. It was a Barcelona capable of combining avant-garde with tradition, the rigor of craftsmanship with improvisation, and international projection with its own, irreverent, and open identity to the world.
Two figures embody this golden age better than anyone else: Javier Mariscal, the multidisciplinary artist who gave shape and colour to the city’s new visual identity, and Javier de las Muelas, entrepreneur, international cocktail icon and one of the leading thinkers on bar culture and service.
Coming from different worlds that constantly intersected in Barcelona’s nightlife, both helped shape an urban imagination in which design, culture, leisure and creativity were all part of the same lifestyle.
Javier Mariscal was the great visual provocateur of Barcelona during the Transition to democracy and its subsequent modernisation. He turned the urban landscape into his gallery, creating public sculptures that have become part of the city’s heritage, such as La Gamba at Moll de la Fusta and the Gat in the Olympic Village. His defining moment came with the creation of Cobi, the mascot of the 1992 Olympic Games, which, despite initial controversy, became a globally recognised symbol of empathy and avant-garde design.
Later, through Estudio Mariscal, he continued to break new ground in illustration for publications such as The New Yorker, industrial design and animated cinema, earning an Academy Award nomination for the film Chico y Rita (2010).
Javier de las Muelas has transformed cocktail-making and hospitality into a practice rooted in craftsmanship, rigour and thought. The year 1986 marked a turning point in pre-Olympic Barcelona with the opening of the legendary Nick Havanna nightclub. The venue combined video walls, sushi and an elegant, groundbreaking aesthetic in which male waiters wore skirts and female waiters wore trousers.
This innovative spirit was further developed through projects such as Gimlet and Dry Martini, the latter elevated to the status of an international temple of cocktail culture and a regular presence on The World’s 50 Best Bars list. Beyond his role as an entrepreneur, De las Muelas’s greatest contribution has been his championing of service culture: a vision of hospitality in which the bartender or waiter acts as a host and an orchestrator of emotions, placing empathy, human connection and social atmosphere above mere consumption.
Coming from different worlds, both have helped shape an image of Barcelona in which design, culture, leisure and creativity are part of one and the same way of life.
This will be the common thread of the next session of Moments Estel·lars, the series organized by The New Barcelona Post, which will propose a dialogue between the two Javiers, led by journalist Toni Aira. More than a conventional interview, the meeting aims to recover the spirit of an era and explore what remains today of that Barcelona that knew how to convert creativity and hedonism into distinctive features of its identity.
Organized with the collaboration of CASA SEAT, Barcelona Global and Must Media Group, the session will be held next Monday, November 2 at 6:30 p.m. at CASA SEAT. The conversation will be recorded in videopodcast format and can be recovered later through The New Barcelona Post's Spotify and YouTube channels.
The Barcelona that invented a lifestyle
What made that creative effervescence possible? How did Mariscal and De las Muelas experience the Barcelona of the eighties and nineties, between the energy of the Olympic transformation and the desire to open new paths? The conversation will recover the atmosphere of a city that experimented with new visual languages, meeting spaces and forms of leisure, and that found in the night one of its great creative laboratories.
From graphic design and character creation to the art of mixology and hospitality, both contributed, from their respective fields, to shaping a Barcelona that not only wanted to modernize, but also to express itself with its own voice. Mariscal projected a free, spontaneous, and recognizable way of understanding design; De las Muelas has transformed mixology into an exercise of craft, creativity, and culture. Two careers that share attention to detail and the desire to turn an everyday experience into something memorable.
The craft, discipline, and art of provocation
Creativity is often associated with intuition and freedom, but behind the ideas that endure there is also technique, discipline, and knowledge of the craft. The meeting will allow exploring this combination of rigor and experimentation, as well as the value of provocation as a driving force to question conventions and open new paths.
What makes an idea become an icon? How do you maintain the ability to surprise after years of experience? And how can one preserve one's own voice in an increasingly globalized environment? Through their experiences, Mariscal and De las Muelas will reflect on the creative processes, references, and attitudes that have marked their professional careers.
Beyond nostalgia, the conversation will also look towards the present and future of the city. Barcelona continues to be an international hub of creativity, design, and gastronomy, but it faces the challenge of preserving its own identity in a context of global homogenization and accelerated urban transformation.