Recycle in the city

Javier Rui-Wamba Martija, founder of the engineering consultancy Esteyco, has died, and I have read some beautiful obituaries. There are people who leave a mark, and I would like to join in adding my recognition. My connection with Esteyco was during the demolition work of the Glòries ring, in Barcelona. With the current park, we almost no longer remember that Glòries was a traffic hub for decades, with viaducts and bridges up and down. Meridiana, Gran Vía, and Diagonal intersect at this point in the city; old photographs show a situation of ramps and connection exits between one avenue and another that explains the traffic jams and long queues for many years. The Glòries ring, built for the 1992 Olympics, was an orderly solution to organize the passage of cars and ensure traffic fluidity. The drum, as the neighbors called it, was useful for traffic, but a real barrier between El Clot and Poblenou or Fort Pienc.

Of the trace of the Glòries ring, now only a pilaster and the shape of the Museu del Disseny building, designed by MBM Arquitectes, remain. Popularly known as the stapler, the nickname describes the visible shape of a zinc and aluminum clad building that flies 14.5 meters above the street to clear the ring, with prominent cantilevers that are the width of Àvila street. It is in this singular volume where the exhibitions and a large auditorium are now a privileged viewpoint over the square. It is a building conceived as a connector to overcome a difference in height of more than 7 meters between Bolívia street and Glòries. With almost 30,000 square meters of built area, 100 million were invested in the construction of the facility. Those were times of ample budgets in cities!

At Esteyco, which had drafted the project and directed the construction works of the ring, they quickly adapted to the transformation of Glòries. Precisely because they had built it, they knew how to dismantle it in sections. Les Encants was the largest recycled products market in the city: originally, objects of the deceased were sold, which is why everything was old, but charming. And a B720 building in the shape of a ramp was being built at the vertex of the square to house the vendors more stably, and then it was necessary to fill the "hole" left by the Encants Vells to level the future park.

Esteyco proposed dismantling the ring in phases, also to allow traffic to adapt gradually. First, the vertical enclosures were removed, revealing the Encinas garden. Then the southern part of the drum was demolished, leaving the Design Museum orphaned of its plinth. Meanwhile, the northern part was maintained for the exit towards Maresme. At the same time, the engineering firm proposed installing a crushing plant on site and reusing the concrete as backfill material to level the trench left by the Mercat dels Encants. It is estimated that this avoided the departure of up to 9,000 trucks to transport the resulting material from the work to the port of Barcelona.

In the end, no visible trace of the road junction remains, although it is still there; buried under the organic layer of the Gran Clariana. Within the framework of healthy competition between architects and engineers, my recognition to the great work of those who made it possible to recycle the city, right there.