Barcelona is many Barcelonas, and from diverse points of view. If we speak of history, we have a Roman, Gothic, Modernist, or Olympic Barcelona. We have the Barcelonas that represent the different neighborhoods and districts, like the Eixample, and within it, the Barcelona of the chamfers. This can be seen in the exhibition El repte del xamfrà, which can be visited at the headquarters of the Col·legi d'Arquitectes since February 19.
The exhibition is made up of a series of photographs by Rosa Feliu and texts by architects Lluís Clotet, Xavier Monteys, and Josep Lluís Mateo. There are only a few days left. It will close next Saturday, April 3, but it is worth a look, as it allows us to highlight this kind of surplus of Ildefons Cerdà's Eixample and appreciate its urbanistic, architectural, and visionary value when it was conceived.
Although the urbanistic resource of the chamfer ---also called ochava--- was already used before the Eixample, it was Cerdà who made a virtue of it. At first glance, it is a more useful element from an urbanistic point of view than an architectural one, because by widening the intersections, circulation is improved, especially turns, which drivers can maneuver less forcedly and with greater visibility than if they had to do so at a right angle if the blocks had been square instead of octagonal.
Cerdà was truly a visionary and ahead of his time. In the mid-90s, I published a report about him in which I defined him as the Jules Verne of urbanism. Today I reaffirm this, because he conceived an egalitarian, hygienist, and, very importantly, wide-street Eixample. That is, he foresaw the massive presence of automobiles in cities long before their invention. The design of the blocks topped with four chamfers was the icing on that conception.
Today no one doubts the success that Cerdà's Eixample represented for Barcelona, but in its day it was highly contested because it was imposed from Madrid, nullifying the winning proposal of the competition called by Antoni Rovira i Trias's city council, with a radial model that can still be seen in the monument to his memory in the square of Gràcia of the same name. As the exhibition shows, this success was not only urbanistic, but architects have also known over the years how to take advantage of the uniqueness of the chamfer to give free rein to their creativity, profiting from what was initially an inconvenience.
The chamfer forces the buildings erected on them to adapt their shape, as its geometry generates a deformation of space that prevents 90-degree encounters. This particularity was exploited by geniuses such as Antoni Gaudí in his Pedrera ---by the way, also misunderstood in its time and today praised by all--- or Lluís Domènech i Montaner in the Casa Lleó Morera, to name only two representative buildings of Passeig de Gràcia from the modernist splendor.
It is estimated that there are nearly 5,000 chamfers in the Eixample's urban fabric with their respective buildings. Some, like the two mentioned above, are authentic works of art. Others are more conventional residential buildings of all styles. But all have in common their planimetric singularity, which forms a kind of architectural brotherhood that ends up being a very Barcelonian singularity.
In short, one ends up discovering, thanks to Rosa Feliu's work exhibited at the Col·legi d'Arquitectes, that the chamfer has its charm and ends up being more creative than the linear facade. One also realizes, when delving into Cerdà's chamfer, that it also acquires value when it does not exist. I am referring to the evolution of the Eixample's urban fabric when it reaches Poblenou. There, uniformity relaxes and some of the blocks of Vila Olímpica and 22@ open up to other architectural solutions that dispense with the chamfer. However, it is preserved in the road network.
Barcelona is, therefore, the kingdom of the chamfer and Cerdà its prophet.