Twenty-five years ago, several of us began our architecture studies at the Etsab (National Institute of Architecture), in the words of Lázaro Moix. Mayor Maragall had crossed the line, but we learned by walking through his legacy, the research of the Barcelona Urban Planning Laboratory, and the public land reserves of Joan Anton Solans.
Once the Olympic stage was over, there were three major transformation projects: the Fòrum, which began and ended very quickly; the 22@ Poblenou, which was inspired by the research of Borja, Castells, and Saskia Sassen on global cities and the knowledge society; and the Sagrera, where the AVE trains still don't stop today. Nobody worried about money, it's curious. Investment calculations were made in which everything fit: the sale of the resulting apartments would more than pay for the replacement of the tracks and the railway box; It would quickly be covered with a large concrete slab, and a large park would be built on top of it, which was announced to be completed in 2004. At that time, there was talk of urban borders, artificial landscapes, flows, networks, agglomeration economics, and of large technology corporations that would create workplaces that went to the Maghreb or Southeast Asia to reduce production costs.
In libraries, we went to photocopy books or borrow them, and there were fewer of them than there are now. At the Faculty of Architecture, we were interested in the transformation of the port of Amsterdam into residential neighborhoods and in the buildings and drawings of Álvaro Siza, and in the magazine Notebooks Architects of the caliber of Rafael Moneo and Hashim Sarkis, to name a few, published together.
There was a recurring controversy over the School of Architecture's move to Besòs, on the other side of Avinguda Diagonal, which had only been opened to the sea a few years earlier. It was a matter of leading by example and introducing a mix and diversity into historically segregated neighborhoods. But today, the Etsab remains in Les Corts, and the Besòs Campus in Sant Adrià still has empty plots.
Barcelona was a very convenient city for getting everywhere on foot or by metro, but I bought a motorbike. Passeig de Gràcia had bookstores like Jaimes, shops like Vinçon, the Servei Estació, and Bulevar Rosa. In the streets of the Eixample, there were more hardware stores, grocery stores, farms, movie theaters, and drugstores, and far fewer luxury restaurants and hotels. The windows at home didn't have the insulation and thickness they have now, so you could feel everything, especially on summer nights. Urban logistics included shops and restaurants, but there was no delivery in every home. There were vendors on the building's steps, like the frozen food vendors: they'd buzz in on each intercom, you could place your order right then and there, and if they had it, they'd bring it down from the truck for you. Otherwise, we filled the fridge by walking or going to the Pryca at the airport, because it was easy to park there and they had everything.
My French teacher, who had family in Amposta, referred to Renfe as "Please Push Our Broken Railways", but we Barcelonans were unaware of the problem because we hadn't yet moved to the provinces.
Housing, back then, didn't seem like a problem to us either. There were rental apartments we could afford if we shared, we worked more than one job simultaneously, and we couldn't even forget the bursting of the bubble. unions, but everyone criticized it because it would never be theirs to get an apartment like this... What a shortsightedness!
