Where does the imagined Barcelona remain?

When Barcelona prepared for the 1992 Olympic Games, it didn't build one city. It built several. There is one that we all know. There is another that we have almost forgotten. Two extraordinary urban operations. Two radically different destinies. And, paradoxically, two stories that speak to us of the same failure.A few days ago, during a visit organized by the Group of Architects for the Defense and Intervention in Architectural Heritage (AADIPA), we toured the Olympic area of Vall d'Hebron again. More than visiting some buildings, we rediscovered an extraordinarily modern idea of a city that, thirty-four years later, seems to have been abandoned by those who were supposed to continue making it grow. Eduard Bru's urbanism was not a finished project. It was an open structure, capable of evolving over time, which aimed to reconnect Barcelona with Collserola. Elevated walkways that transformed into balconies over the city, pergolas that generated shade and public space, platforms that stitched together the sports facilities, and a landscape designed so that greenery and water would give it meaning. It was an urbanism that trusted in the future. But that future never arrived.The uses were not completed. The spaces were not consolidated. The ensemble was not maintained. And what was to become one of Barcelona's great gateways to Collserola has too often ended up becoming an inhospitable landscape, where vandalism has replaced life and where abandonment has slowly erased the original project. And yet, the architecture continues to be moving.The Palau Olímpic de la Vall d’Hebron, a work by Jordi Garcés and Enric Sòria, continues to surprise more than three decades later. Externally, it is a large brick volume, almost a fortress, with a solidity that seems immune to the passage of time. It is difficult to imagine that behind that apparent simplicity lie two sports pavilions. But it is precisely inside where the architecture unfolds all its sensitivity. The long access corridor, between the pelota courts, culminates in a large stained-glass window that frames the three chimneys of Sant Adrià and turns that end of the route into an authentic balcony over Barcelona. At the other end, the handball pavilion is an immense cube of air where a reticulated roof lets in light with unexpected delicacy, which seems to stop time and makes the roof levitate above the brick walls. An austere and silent architecture that continues to excite because its quality does not depend on trends.

But it is in the archery facilities by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós where the narrative becomes more striking. Part of the work has been dismantled and the pieces rest stacked by the roadside, as if they were part of the stony waste of any landfill. It is difficult to imagine a more painful metaphor for the treatment we dispense to our contemporary heritage. The other part still resists. Unused, vandalized and slowly deteriorating, but with an architectural strength that remains intact and allows us to imagine a respectful recovery so that it can once again serve the sports facilities that surround it.Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, the Olympic Village of Poblenou has taken the opposite path. Its proximity to the center, urban consolidation, and the impetus of 22@ have fully integrated it into Barcelona. But today it faces another threat: that of a real estate market that is beginning to overwhelm it. Emblematic buildings are abandoned and auctioned off; others are sold to vulture funds that strip them of their soul, alter their uses, and transform the iconic image of an architecture conceived as a coherent whole. It is not the abandonment of Vall d'Hebron. It is another form of oblivion: the inability to recognize the heritage value of contemporary architecture before the market ends up disfiguring it.They are two opposing realities, but they share the same cause. We still think that heritage needs to age to be recognized. And that is the mistake. Time is only one of the values that can turn a work into heritage. So are architectural quality and the capacity to transform the city, to influence the discipline, to build collective memory, and to explain a way of understanding the world. The Olympic Games not only left buildings: they left a way of understanding the city. And what we risk losing today is not just architecture, but also the urban culture that made it possible.We are still in time. We are still in time to recover the routes of the Vall d’Hebron, to bring back the water, to replant the green spaces, to rehabilitate the pavilions and to reveal again that city that neglect has been hiding, almost like ancient cities swallowed by the jungle. But, above all, we are still in time for someone to look at it again, to recognize it, to know it and to love it again. Because only what a society loves is capable of preserving it. Contemporary heritage does not disappear because it is old. It disappears because we have not yet understood that it is already heritage.