At the end of the 20th century, theories on postmodernity put the term "non-places" into circulation. These were spaces condemned to transience, interchangeable with one another. Airports, highway service areas, shopping centers, train stations... The concept became so widespread that now, as we receive the dark turn of the illusions that postmodernity hid, it is already difficult for anything not to seem like a non-place to us, or for us not to be tempted to put the negation before any noun. Perhaps because transience has become embedded in much of what we tread upon, like a kidney stone. And despite everything, wandering up and down through the non-place, we find a particularity that, however grotesque it may seem at times, does not cease to have a touch of charm.
Urquinaona is a non-square, if it is possible to redundantly elaborate a bit more on the idea of the non-place, inevitably sweaty and squeezed. It has always seemed to me a very Barcelonian square. Perhaps because of the resonance of the name. It is a unique sonority, which to the ears of the non-Barcelonian vibrates inseparably linked to the city center (its name is that of a bishop, José María de Urquinaona y Bidot, who arrived in Barcelona in 1877 and is celebrated for having blessed the first stone of the Sagrada Familia).
One of the things most done in Urquinaona square is waiting at traffic lights, whether you are walking, driving, or inside a bus. To say Urquinaona is to say waiting, which is even funnier because it brings the square closer to the life of an airport but also to the expectation of the arrival of some change.Perhaps Urquinaona is a non-square because it adopts the functions of a heart with multiple ventricles that never stop: some pump towards Ronda de Sant Pere and Via Layetana, others towards Pau Claris and Roger de Llúria streets. Ventricles that lead towards the Right Eixample (is there any cardinal point more Barcelonian than this?) or towards La Ribera and Santa Caterina. Ventricles that release cars, buses, subways, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians waiting at the infinite traffic lights that never chain together.
One of the most common things to do in Urquinaona square is to wait at traffic lights, whether you're walking, driving, or inside a bus. To say Urquinaona is to say waiting, which is even funnier because it brings the square closer to the life of an airport but also to the expectation of some change arriving. Sometimes one waits with the hope that some kind of improvement will land, a change in the situation. By now we must be as hypermodern and ultramodern as one wishes, but even so, one never stops waiting, even if one doesn't know exactly what for, even if the panel that indicates when the next bus arrives is broken and the red light of the traffic signal lasts incomprehensibly long.
When waiting in Urquinaona square, especially if on foot, it's easy to notice its ugliness, a not insignificant aspect that helps reaffirm its liquid modernity. You don't feel comfortable there. So many things happen above, below, and underneath in Urquinaona, all swiftly, that even pedestrians feel like moving quickly. But we stop at the traffic light, let's say the one at the corner with the Borràs theater, a theater founded in 1931, whose exterior sign has an old-fashioned, popular air. We stop at the traffic light and continue scratching the back of that square that will reveal some mysteries to us. If we look to the right, we will see a building with a sinuous facade, a balcony that looks like an armor that fits the chamfer, the Fàbregas building. According to Xavier Theros, it is Barcelona's first skyscraper, begun in 1936 and inaugurated in a period as gray as the square would eventually become, in 1944.
Here, a kiosk (whose survival is already becoming news); there, a bicycle parking. Here, the metro entrance. There, the parking entrance. Here, some pigeons; there, the Font del Noi dels Càntirs.From the corner of the Borràs theater, if we look straight ahead, at the distance of several traffic lanes and a handful more of traffic lights to dawdle, we see that tower that at some point must have been the latest in architecture, but now, as we turn our eyes, it rather causes a gasp of astonishment: it is a brown shadow, a skyscraper that seems erected to ridicule the harmony of the Eixample buildings, a kind of unfinished "Tente", with a difficult-to-digest profile. Its style is rationalist, which is not necessarily reassuring. It was finished in the 70s, which in Barcelona is like saying that any debate about the urban landscape ends here.
The multiform architectural pastiche surrounding the square spreads like an oil stain to all its elements. Plane trees next to palm trees. Eixample apartment balconies above shops with strident lights. Withered herbs to simulate a bit of green in contrast with the dark asphalt of a pedestrian patch. Here, a kiosk (whose survival is already starting to be news); there, a bicycle parking. Here, the subway entrance. There, the parking entrance. Here, some pigeons; there, the Font del Noi dels Càntirs. The boy from the fountain, with sleeves rolled up like a Tom Sawyer, drinks from a botijo and has another one overturned on the ground. The sculpture, a work by Josep Campeny i Santamaria, was placed at this spot in 1912. It's a shame the boy with the botijo cannot tell us what the square was like more than a hundred years ago, or if he has gotten used to the incessant noise or the fact that no one stops to contemplate him. It's a shame he cannot tell us if he liked it better when Urquinaona was a place or when it became a non-place. At least neither of the two botijos in the fountain has broken.