Cerdà's Cut Corners: The Grid Nobody Wanted
Why is it significant?
Stand at the corner where Passeig de Gràcia meets the Gran Via and look at the shape of the crossing itself. The buildings do not meet in sharp right angles. Every corner has been sliced off, so the junction opens into a wide octagon of light and air.
Key Facts
| Place | Cerdà's Cut Corners: The Grid Nobody Wanted |
|---|---|
| Address | Passeig de Gràcia & Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 08007 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38900, 2.16700 |
| Part of Walk | The Block of Discord: Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia and the Modernista Rivalry |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the corner where Passeig de Gràcia meets the Gran Via and look at the shape of the crossing itself. The buildings do not meet in sharp right angles. Every corner has been sliced off, so the junction opens into a wide octagon of light and air.
That cut corner is the signature of Ildefons Cerdà, an engineer born in Centelles, north of the city, whose plan for the new Barcelona was approved in 1859. He drew an immense grid of identical blocks, each about one hundred and thirteen metres a side, with streets twenty metres wide and every corner chamfered. Locals call those corners xamfrans. They gave drivers a clear view, room to turn, and, Cerdà imagined, space for the steam trams of the future.
Barcelona did not exactly thank him. The City Council had run its own competition and chosen the plan of a local architect, Antoni Rovira i Trias, a grand design radiating out from the old city. Then the government in Madrid imposed Cerdà's grid instead. Much of the local elite found it monotonous, egalitarian, a chessboard dictated from outside, and Cerdà died in 1876 with little of the credit he deserved.
His real dream is still hidden inside the blocks. Cerdà wanted buildings on only two sides of each block, with gardens in the middle, so that every family would get sun and fresh air. He studied death rates in the overcrowded old town obsessively, and he is credited with coining the Spanish word urbanización for the new science he was inventing. Speculators had other plans: within decades most blocks were built up on all four sides, and the gardens disappeared under workshops and courtyards. Only in recent decades has the city begun to win some of those inner gardens back.
Still, it was his grid that gave the Modernista architects their stage: a wide boulevard, regular plots, and rich clients desperate to outshine one another. Walk up the left-hand side of Passeig de Gràcia for two blocks. At the corner of Carrer del Consell de Cent, the competition begins.