The Sagrada Família has requested permission from Barcelona City Council to begin the facade of the Glòria, and this has encouraged me to revisit some reflections I had made many years ago about the surroundings of the monument.
The Sagrada Família is the favorite controversy of many generations of Barcelona residents, and I often pass beneath its foundations, because the AVE tunnel (also a very dramatic discussion at the time) runs along Provença Street.
The area surrounding the Sagrada Família is well-established (it's been under construction for years), but current planning provides for the demolition of a wide strip of buildings in front of its main façade. This is what the plans show in orange as point 14a and in green as point 17/6: the equivalent of 300 homes affected by the conversion into a green zone and another 600 pending specific regulation. However, it's clear that what the planning says makes no sense and the urban impacts will have to be resolved differently. We're talking about hundreds of residents living in uncertainty and impacts that degrade the built environment condemned many years ago. Now, developing a more viable alternative is an opportunity to address the externalities of mass tourism and transform the surrounding area into a more decent piece of the city.
The transformation of the Sagrada Família area requires sensitivity: access points must be designed without breaking with the logic of the Eixample, emphasizing the block interiors and maintaining the cadence between blocks, passageways, interior courtyards, and harmonious heights. Attempting to erase pre-existing elements would only create a hodgepodge unworthy of the present. The facades of Marina and Sardenya Streets and their rearmost sections, with their disordered galleries and irregular courtyards, must be preserved because, even after a few years, they also possess a certain heritage value, a unified urban landscape.
But, above all, the access routes to the Sagrada Família have the potential to generate a more complete tour, allowing for the elimination of crowds. It's worth noting that from the new Parque de les Glòries to the Sagrada Família, passing through the modernist complex of the Hospital de Sant Pau, one can reach the Tres Turons viewpoint, and explain that Barcelona is Gaudí and, at the same time, the Carmel neighborhood. The way of doing things of the bourgeoisie, the church, and monumentality have coexisted for decades with informality and self-construction. A reading of the city is more complete when done from this dual perspective: that of the monumental city and that of the neighborhoods of the people who built precisely this monumentality. Thinking in terms of a line (a route) rather than a point (a monument) helps mitigate the massive influx of tourists, who can move around on foot instead of being stuck in a single corner.
Gaudí conceived the Sagrada Família so that it could be viewed from the diagonals, always ensuring the perception of two facades. This idea was already reflected in the 1917 Plan de Conexiones, which proposed spaces around it that favored this perspective. Viewing the Sagrada Família only from the front is a folly born of the obsession with order that underlies totalitarianism.
Urban planning has become such a technical discipline, so dependent on the approval of decrees, procedures, plans, and economic studies, that the city has long postponed making decisions regarding the design and composition of the Sagrada Família area with new ideas. Redesigning, rethinking views, routes, and the coexistence of everyday uses and tourism seems to me to be an exciting project for a city like Barcelona, where the architecture sector can create meaningful urban proposals.
Objectively, the Sagrada Família neighborhood is one of the densest in Barcelona. From a neighborhood perspective, it's difficult to understand why it's necessary to design access routes for a building that generates thousands of visitors (and revenue) without considering the provision of community spaces at the neighborhood level. But the two are not incompatible: making room for the Sagrada Família visitor center necessarily involves considering how to make room for subsidized housing, educational spaces, community centers, senior housing, and civic and organization centers. It can all be done simultaneously.
For now, as pedestrians walk along Diagonal, there's a symbolic image: a small opening between two five-story residential buildings on Carrer Aragó, condemned by current planning, with a blue sign reading: "Manhattan Parking." And in the background, the Sagrada Família and its cranes rise. The micro-staircase and the global staircase, in a single photo. Welcome to Barcelona!
