The brilliant figure of Ildefons Cerdà has often served as a scapegoat. The trend was inaugurated by a prominent figure of conservative Catalanism and modernist architecture, Josep Puig i Cadafalch. His obsession still lingers. The Barcelona City Council finally wants to dedicate a sculpture to Cerdà in Plaça Universitat, one of the initial spaces where the Eixample began to be built. Surely someone will still pull out the worn-out ideological clichés about the engineer who shaped modern Barcelona from the drawer of bad intentions: that he was a utopian socialist (false), that he was a rationalist without imagination (false), that Madrid imposed his project on us (in this case, it was lucky). For too long he has been absurdly and simplistically disdained as a centralist stain.
The long silence that Cerdà suffered has been gradually corrected, largely thanks to engineers, who have adopted him as a reference. Albert Serratosa was a great Cerdanià supporter and has had continuity in Francesc Magrinyà or Andreu Ulied, among others. Magrinyà has now published the exhaustive Teoría Cerdà. La revolución urbana e industrial (UPC). But also by architects like Oriol Bohigas, the first to seriously advocate for him, and Salvador Tarragó; and many others.
Gaudí, from a completely different angle, was also misunderstood due to his excessive and unclassifiable modernism, his extreme religiosity and Catalanism, and the apparent distance that separated him from architectural modernity. A triple squinting valuation that was corrected sooner than in Cerdà's case. Gaudí is today immensely popular and universally admired. The controversy over the continuation of the Sagrada Família has remained, however. But both supporters and detractors of finishing it do so in his defense.
This year we celebrate 100 years since the death of Gaudí and 150 years since the death of Cerdà. Two prolific geniuses without whom Barcelona would not be what it is nor would it have achieved the renown it has. Gaudí's relevance is artistic; Cerdà's, structural. They are the fruit of different times, strong personalities with great creative capacity and phenomenal practical determination. People of action and thought, of science-technique and imagination. Inventors of forms.
Cerdà was very critical of an immobilist and corrupt Spain. He came from a well-off rural family from Centelles and confronted his father to be able to study first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. He was a scientific reformer, a hygienist, with political acumen - a parliamentarian in Madrid, a councilor in Barcelona and president of the Diputació de Barcelona - and entrepreneurial ability - he created a company to build the Eixample - a man of liberal social orientation, federalist and republican. He thought of the common interest. He was well-connected, married to the painter Clotilde Bosch, daughter of the Indian enriched in Cuba Josep Bosch. Clotilde was part of Isabel II's court entourage, with whom she went into exile in Paris. Clotilde and Ildefons separated, she had betrayed him... Perhaps this fueled his republicanism. He lived only for the Eixample.
He habitually spoke Catalan and his Spanish had a strong accent. He mastered French: he often traveled to Paris, where he met Baron Haussmann, the great urban planner, who wanted to keep him there. Cerdà was a typical modern man of the 19th-century urban revolution - industry, steam, railway... - who looked towards the future with optimism and a desire to overcome inequalities. He was not a revolutionary: "I don't think anyone will judge me so stupid as to suppose I would propose the expropriation of all the land included in the Eixample project".
Gaudí was also an adopted Barcelonian, a fervent Catholic and a radical Catalan nationalist. It was in his youth that the Renaixença erupted, followed by political Catalanism. He also had a technical spirit and ambition for well-done work, attentive, like Cerdà, to international innovations. He also thought of the common interest, but instead of political vision, he had spiritual inspiration. Both lived obsessed with their work. Now that we celebrate their anniversaries, it would be good for Barcelona if Gaudí did not overshadow Cerdà.
