Those shopping galleries in Barcelona’s Turó Park known as Vía Wagner will be reborn as an entire office complex designed for large companies. Some investors are willing to face the curse of these facilities and give them a new opportunity after 30 years of oblivion, looting, fires, occupations… Their objective is to make those old commercial galleries, once called to be the most chic of the city, a bright office complex intended mainly for renowned firms.
Here, at this point in Sarrià-Sant Gervasí, between Bethoveen and Borí i Fontestà streets and Diagonal avenue, if everything goes according to plan, if perhaps the bad fario does not do its thing again, next year or the Next, three or four prominent companies and about 250 employees could set up shop. Neighbors and surrounding merchants celebrate the news. This long fallow season had been burning in the neighborhood for a long time. The recovery of these dependencies is a very old citizen demand.
Because the resurgence of the Wagners must also entail the revitalization of a privileged square that has not raised its head for decades. And lately this side of Barcelona is becoming a pole of business attraction, a circumstance that is leading to the opening of new restaurants and businesses of a certain level.
Furthermore, the promoters of the new complex plan to allocate some facilities to the entities in the area, which in truth do not exactly have plenty of equipment.
The architects Jordi Artigas and Andreu Franquesa, from OUA Group, the architectural studio in charge of developing this initiative, explain that the origin of the curse of the Via Wagner has an administrative nature. A unique division of horizontal property gave rise to each establishment having an owner. Typically, commercial spaces are managed by an operator who rents the different premises. In the Wagners, a hundred owners had to agree on each decision. The hallways seemed more soulless every day. Thus there was no way to compete with the new and emerging large shopping centers. Business closures followed one another. And all that was a burden that condemned the galleries to closure in 1993.
But the curse did not stop there. The facilities were occupied, they became a refuge for criminals specialized in stealing from drivers stopped at the traffic lights on Diagonal. Grandparents stopped walking around with their grandchildren. And in 2001 a fire put an end to the looting. It took firefighters more than seven hours to extinguish the fire. After the flames passed, there was nothing left to take. Meanwhile, customs changed, and the commercial gallery format accelerated its slow decline. They tried to build houses, but the project turned out to be ruinous. As soon as there were threats, the years went by… The truth is that locating so many heirs of the locals was not an easy task.
“Proposing commercial galleries again was not an option,” explain the architects Artigas and Franquesa. The office market in general is also suffering, but not so much in the prime area, between Passeig de Gràcia and the CaixaBank towers. Some investors took over most of the property, with around 80%. The idea is to open the property to the outside to fill it with light and interact with the square. “We propose a façade.” We are talking about about 2,100 m2 of offices with a covered terrace of another 800.
Bartolomé Criado, president of the Turó Park neighborhood and merchant association, applauds the rebirth of the Vía Wagner galleries. For many years this entity has been demanding that these facilities be reused once and for all, to somehow alleviate the lack of equipment in the area.
“The neighborhood could not afford so many years of disuse of such privileged spaces,” Criado continues. Its recovery will also lead to the revitalization of the surrounding area. Furthermore, everything indicates that we will be able to make use of some of the new spaces. It will be great news for older people, who barely have anywhere to find themselves. Furthermore, the use of offices seems appropriate to us. It’s a good way to adapt to the times. For some time now, the number of offices in the surrounding area has been growing, and this is leading to a coming and going of workers that is giving rise to the opening of restaurants and all types of quality businesses.”