Frank Gehry's Peix: The Golden Fish of 1992
Why is it significant?
There it is, shimmering above the promenade: an enormous fish made of a golden mesh of steel strips, its body curving as if it had just leapt out of the water. Depending on the light it looks gold, bronze or almost silver, and in the wind you half expect it to swim off.
Key Facts
| Place | Frank Gehry's Peix: The Golden Fish of 1992 |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de la Marina 19, 08005 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38630, 2.19660 |
| Part of Walk | Barceloneta and the Sea: Barcelona's Fishermen, Bombas and Beaches |
| Generated | Generated |
There it is, shimmering above the promenade: an enormous fish made of a golden mesh of steel strips, its body curving as if it had just leapt out of the water. Depending on the light it looks gold, bronze or almost silver, and in the wind you half expect it to swim off. Behind it, the two tallest towers on this shore.
It is called simply Peix, Fish, and it was designed by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry for the Olympic Games of 1992. Gehry had a lifelong obsession with fish. He liked to tell how, as a boy in Toronto, his grandmother would buy a live carp for the Friday meal and keep it swimming in the bathtub until it was cooked, and how he spent hours watching it. Fish turned up in his lamps, his drawings and his buildings for decades.
This one was also a laboratory. To design and build its complicated curves, Gehry's office used computer software borrowed from the aerospace industry. A few years later, the same approach made possible his titanium museum in Bilbao. So in a way, the Guggenheim's famous curves first swam here, on the beach of Barcelona.
Around it stands the Port Olímpic, built for the sailing events of 1992, and the two towers, the Hotel Arts and the Torre Mapfre, which for years were the tallest buildings in Spain. The old industrial shore you have just walked along became, in a few years, a seafront of restaurants, marinas and nightlife.
And this is where the walk ends, where fish began it. You started on the quay where the fishermen landed their catch, walked through their little planned town of 1753, its market, its bomba and its legends, past the beaches the city reclaimed for itself, to a fish of gold that never needed the sea at all. Find a terrace, order something from the morning's catch, and look at the Mediterranean that made all of this.