In 1981, the architect and town planner Oriol Bohigas, at that time the city planning delegate of Barcelona City Council, commissioned Antoni Tàpies to honor the memory of Pablo Picasso on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The Catalan artist devised a unique sculptural ensemble next to the Ciutadella park, on the promenade that, just a couple of years ago, had the name of the universal genius. Homage to Picasso was inaugurated 40 years ago, with the glass cube containing battered furniture and resting on a small pond. Next to the monument, two canals were built, marked by four water spouts, connected to the Tàpies installation to produce the permanent effect of the liquid sliding over the glass. Today, the water – in times of restrictions due to the drought, but taking advantage of the water table that keeps the Ciutadella park relatively green – still flows over the glass, but it stopped doing so through the canals, which have long since become a dry pit that has lost functionality.
The Barcelona City Council is studying the elimination of this channel which does nothing more than subtract useful space from a promenade that in the coming years, as part of the transformation project of the Ciutadella park and its surroundings, will surely undergo a redevelopment, like the other streets that delimit the historic garden of the city, such as Wellington and, most especially, the disturbing promenade of Circumvallation, also known as the path of the elephants in the neighborhood with the zoo.
The reform of Paseo Picasso, where the new door leading to the remodeled Martorell museum was opened for the first time last week, could include, among other changes, the layout of a bike lane and the opening of new pedestrian crossings from Born to the park that would improve connectivity between the two sides of Paseo Picasso. The canal-moat acts precisely as a barrier, as the clueless – or imprudent – ??pedestrian who tries to cross where he shouldn’t have been able to see.
Improving access to the Ciutadella through Paseo Picasso is probably one of the simplest measures to implement in an urban area like this, which is a basic part of the Ciutadella del Coneixement, one of the most important projects that Barcelona has in the portfolio for the rest of the decade.
In mid-March, the municipal government, then still chaired by Ada Colau, pointed to some of the contents of the new Ciutadella park master plan that was supposed to replace the one from 2003. Five years earlier, in 2018, during the first mandate of the first female mayor of Barcelona, ??the beginning of the process for the drafting of the new plan was already announced.
The five years that have passed since the announcement and the journalistic leak of the document allow one to get an idea of ??the complication of acting in this area of ??the city, especially because the old aspiration, which some of the mayors who preceded Ada already had Colau, to connect the Ciutadella with the sea saving the beach of tracks of the França station is not a simple solution at all.
In addition, during this long period, the project of the Ciutadella del Coneixement took place – the creation of a large pole of science, research and innovation – which forces us to rethink some of the proposals designed for the old park.
The revision of some aspects of the draft of the Ciutadella park master plan is now on the table of the socialist government in minority. At the inauguration of the Hivernacle last week, Mayor Collboni expressed the desire to intervene quickly in the Ciutadella. In fact, many of the actions that could see the light of day in the next three years are planned in the document that the Barcelona Regional agency drew up in 2018 on behalf of the City Council and, even, can be found rummaging through the newspaper library municipal texts that date back to the time of mayor Joan Clos. This is the case of the opening of new access doors to a park whose permeability is now conditioned by the existence of an impassable wall of almost a kilometer and a half.
