The inventor of green Barcelona

We often discover the garlic soup. Today, the topic is re-naturalizing the city as a new trend: green axes, superblocks, restoring porous pavements, creating vertical gardens, etc. Without a climate crisis, from an hygienic perspective, Ildefons Cerdà already wanted to "urbanize the countryside and ruralize the city" more than a century and a half ago. And a century ago, Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí (1891-1981), the first landscape architect in Catalonia and Southern Europe, a disciple of the Frenchman Forestier, envisioned the great Barcelona with a green vision: Tibidabo, Vallvidrera and Montjuïc; Vallcarca, Park Güell and Guinardó Park; the Llobregat and Besòs rivers as large water parks; Pedralbes and Horta; and especially the beaches as an extensive linear urban park. We have taken too long, far too long, to pay attention to him.

It is now 100 years since the appearance of his study El problema de los espacios libres —during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—, of which the City Council has just published a commented facsimile edition with texts by Maria Buhigas, Joan Busquets, Montse Rivero, Vicenç Casals and Enric Batlle. It is an essential book.

Rubió i Tudurí is a character as interesting as he is unknown to the general public. For Barcelona, he is the green Cerdà. Even now, we follow his footsteps. Just as Pere Garcia Fària (1858-1927), another unknown, is the underground Cerdà: he designed the sewage system.

Who was Rubió and what did he do? Born in Menorca, he was the eldest of five siblings. His mother was from a well-off island family, and his father, Marià Rubió i Bellver, was a military engineer born in Reus. A brother of his father, the architect and hunter Joan Rubió i Bellver, was a student and collaborator of Gaudí and is an ancestor of the Solà-Morales dynasty of architects.

The father of our protagonist soon moved to Barcelona, where he directed the Societat Anònima del Tibidabo, promoted by Dr. Andreu. In the Catalan capital, Nicolau Maria obtained his architecture degree in 1915 with Domènech i Montaner as director of the School of Architecture, while also attending Francesc d’Assís Galí’s Noucentista art school.

Through his father's influence, he became the assistant that Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier needed to bring to life the commission to turn Montjuïc into a large park. The painter Josep Maria Sert, based in Paris, had met Forestier and spoken to him about the young politician Cambó, who a few years earlier (1905) had already participated in the election of another Frenchman, Léon Jaussely, to monumentalize and introduce green spaces into the city, linking Cerdà's Eixample with the suburban areas. The Exhibition of Electrical Industries was to be held in Montjuïc, for which Nicolau Maria's father was an advisor, and which would eventually be the International Exhibition of 1929.

A young 'charming' and sociable

Charming and sociable, the young Nicolau Maria made good use of the opportunity. With Forestier, they became "instant friends." He was his collaborator until the death, in 1930, of the botanist-urbanist, a follower of Haussmann's Paris, Forestier, who created the park system of the French capital, adopting the idea of parkways (tree-lined boulevards) from the North American Olmsted, the author of New York's Central Park.

In 1917, Rubió i Tudurí was appointed director of the Public Parks and Tree-Lining Service of Barcelona. Between 1920 and 1924, he was secretary of the Civic Society Ciutat Jardí. He established alliances between the public and private sectors (especially with horticultural entrepreneurs). He promoted the acquisition of land (including Park Güell and Plaça de la Sagrada Família), the creation of nurseries and the school for gardeners (which he did not achieve until 1933), and the New Roses Competition of Pedralbes (1929).

During those years, he also engaged in press dissemination and worked as an architect with an eclectic style. As a literary man, he wrote novels and plays, and translated none other than Montaigne. And in his artistic facet, he created, with the ceramicist Llorens Artigas, about sixty miniature gardens that were exhibited in Paris, London, and New York.

But above all, he developed his own landscape proposal for Barcelona (1917) inspired by the cases of Boston (supramunicipal perspective), Baltimore (two rivers as a park ring), and Vienna (the spaces of the old walls as green belts). The book now recovered is the culmination of this vision, to which we must add his conception of a southern garden —Mediterranean and Latin—, with terraces as a key element, with which he distanced himself from English landscaping and French formalism.

This brilliant career was cut short by the war and the dictatorship, which led him to spend eight years in exile in Paris, where he survived as an artistic craftsman: as a costume designer for the Basque couturier Balenciaga, as a jewelry designer, and as a shop window decorator. During those years, he associated with Catalan artists and intellectuals such as the aforementioned Josep M. Sert, Lluís Nicolau d’Olwer, or Pablo Picasso. In the French capital, at the age of 50, he married Montserrat Pla. Upon returning to Catalonia, having been purged, he had to dedicate himself to creating private gardens for individuals, companies, and hotel groups: in Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Madrid, the Basque Country, the Balearic Islands, and the Canary Islands.

Thinker, architect and manager, Catalanist, federalist and defender of the Mediterranean, his legacy consists of more than 175 landscaped environments, among which are, from the 20s and 30s, the renovation of the Palau de Pedralbes, Plaça Francesc Macià or Turó Park; and from later, the rear gardens of El Putxet for Bertran i Güell, Can Forns in l’Ametlla del Vallès for Salvador Millet, the gardens of Cap sa Sal in Begur and those of the Hotel de Mar in Palma.

Rubió i Tudurí died at 90 years of age in 1981, 45 years ago now.