Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain, just over one and a half million inhabitants, together with the suburbs - about 5 million people. The capital of Catalonia, which hosted the 1992 Olympics, is one of the ten largest metropolises in the world. The chief architect of Barcelona, Jose-Antoni Asebillo Marin, spoke about how the problems of a modern city are being solved.
Buildings of today are like an iceberg
Barcelona boasts representative architecture. But the guest spoke of the architecture of certain structures as a trifle, emphasizing the priority of urban planning tasks over volumetric design.
Take Ramblas, for example: pedestrians do not get in the way of cars hidden in the tunnel, by the way, the perspective is closed by Gaudí's Sagrada Familia. The author of the museum center is Zaha Hadid. The skyscraper was designed by Jean Nouvel. What's on the covers of magazines is just the tip of the iceberg. A city is much more than a beautiful composition of well-designed houses. This is a complex organism, a very expensive undertaking.
The future of cities lies underground
The core of a modern city is unthinkable without high-rise buildings. But modernist buildings on legs are a thing of the past. To get rid of the complicated road junctions that Asebillo Marin likens to spaghetti coiled up, the city is spreading underground. It is important to strive for the efficient functioning of the city. To do this, it is necessary to concentrate development in business centers, to decide on the transport structure. And if earlier Barcelona grew in breadth, spreading to the west, now the city is growing underground and towards the sea with the help of complex engineering measures. An important component of the city's success is attention to environmental issues. The professor spoke about the technologies of using the energy of the sun and sea.
As of today, Barcelona's main problems have been resolved. What's the recipe? The abbreviation FIRE stands for the four main conditions for the development of the city - finance (Finanses), guarantees (Insurance), real estate (Realty), entrepreneurship (Enterprise).
The territory is isotropic. We work not with plans, but with ideas
Jose Assebillo noted that cities in lagging countries are developing according to the master plan (animation in the hall). He and his team work on the principle of searching for Ideas and gradually implementing them based on motivated entrepreneurship.
The territory, which was once fertile fields, is being actively developed for housing and a business center. In the 19th century, the fields turned into an industrial zone. The land in this place has always been used efficiently. The next step is the development of the institute center.
Barcelona continues to evolve and is poised for a population explosion.
