Would you like to live in Eixample?
Modern Barcelona was born in L'Eixample, devised by the engineer and urban planner to whom it owes its magical and unique drawing: Ildefons Cerdà. With his urban plan, Cerdà designed an egalitarian city, where some neighbourhoods are indistinguishable from others and public services are distributed evenly in all corners.
The district is the result of one of the most splendid moments in the city's history, when it definitively became the engine of contemporary Catalonia and broke with the mediaeval past by demolishing the walls. L'Eixample was built in the years of the industrialization of Catalonia, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The central part, the Dreta de l'Eixample, was the neighbourhood of the bourgeoisie who introduced their own style, modernism, into their homes.
L'Eixample is made up of six neighbourhoods: Dreta de l'Eixample, Antiga Esquerra de l'Eixample, Nova Esquerra de l'Eixample, Fort Pienc, Sagrada Família and Sant Antoni.
Its urban plan was based on a large network of perpendicular and crossing streets, all of them uniform, except for two superimposed biassed roads -the Diagonal and the Meridiana- and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. The point where these axes met was the great communications centre of L'Eixample, in which a large square was planned, that of the Glòries Catalanes. With great rigour, he foresaw the uniform distribution of service areas, such as markets, social centres and churches, and large district parks.
The apples were not exactly square, since, to facilitate visibility, the angles were cut in the form of chamfers at the corners. Inside each one, construction was only allowed on one or two sides, and the rest of the space was left for the neighbours' garden. The houses were not to be more than three stories high (16 metres), and they were not to be very deep either. Cerdà established it this way because he considered that the health of citizens depended on being able to live in well-lit houses through which the clean air of the gardens circulated, which should completely surround them.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Josep Maria Jujol, Antoni Gaudí and many other architects gradually created the new district. Thus began a new style that moved away from the monotony of eclecticism that had prevailed up to that time: modernism. A style present in buildings of great heritage value that make the centre of the district a unique architectural complex in all of Europe. Modernist architecture mixed the new techniques and materials of the time with the use of resources provided by the various traditional decorative techniques: stucco, sgraffito, leaded glass in stained glass, wrought iron. The work of the craftsmen was put at the service of the design and conception of modernist architects. A new architecture and a new concept of space that brought together the old techniques of tradition and the most innovative, all in harmony at the service of creative freedom, which year after year attracts the eyes of visitors from all over the world.
