12 years ago, in February 2011, the journalist Silvia Angulo explained in the pages of the confirmation of the commitment acquired by the Barcelona City Council in the Cerdà year (2009-2010) to erect a monument to the visionary of the Eixample in a Plaça de les Glòries then occupied by the now-disappeared ring road. Yesterday the Barcelona Consistory, hurried by the imminent ban on inaugurations and presentations imposed by the electoral regulations, recovered this old promise and announced the call for an international competition to commission the design of the pending monument.
The memory of the person and the work of the road engineer that everyone now dares to reinterpret will consist of “an artistic intervention to spread the figure and the urban project” that he devised for the city, according to the agreement signed by the City Council, the College of Road, Canal and Port Engineers of Catalonia (Ildefons Cerdà ‘s guild) and the College of Architects of Catalonia.
This will not be the first monument that Barcelona will dedicate to Cerdà . The previous one was lost in the public memory and in some municipal warehouse where perhaps its ruins still lie. It was installed in 1959 by order of the pro-Franco mayor José MarÃa de Porcioles at the beginning of the Castelldefels motorway, in the place that Plaça Cerdà would occupy years later. The modular composition, the work of municipal architect Antoni M. Riera i Clavillé, was a describable success: it was removed in 1971 and never heard of again. Other much earlier attempts, such as the allegorical project by Pere Falqués for the intersection of Passeig de Grà cia with Ronda Sant Pere – which the press of the time reported on in May 1889 – never even made it to see the light As LluÃs Permanyer explained ( La Vanguardia , May 28, 2009), Mayor Rius i Taulet, burdened by the debt of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, backed out when the foundation stone had already been laid.
