Triptych: Images of Barcelona
by Irina Verona
...a sudden
self-consciousness about its uniqueness erupts. The need to mythologize
its past and rewrite a history that can serve its future becomes urgent.÷Rem
Koolhaas, Delirious New York.
PRETEXT
This article is a triptych÷a set of three images hinged together which, unlike a traditional triptych, are given equal weight in the composition. The format emerged in part as an extreme reaction to the impossibility of choosing a defined set of images of the city, and in part out of the necessity of shifting focus to the mechanism of their production. The triptych is thus a footnote of a larger enterprise, of the study of the way in which a city reformulated itself through images÷specifically, images of architecture. Temporally, it is an "Olympic" undertaking: the way in which Barcelona used the 1992 Olympic Games as a pretext to reinvent itself as a modern city.
Barcelona's self-conscious project of reformulation engaged multiple programs. The Olympics supplied the political and economic forces to implement physical changes in the city. With a legacy of urbanistic neglect and speculation, modernization involved fixing what had deteriorated and providing new facilities, spaces, infrastructures. As an international event, the Games also represented Barcelona's opening to the world after more than forty years of cultural suppression and isolation. The project of modernity was the articulation of the new identity of the city which came into being with the democratic administration.
With the Olympics as pretext, Barcelona sought to establish and present itself as a modern metropolis. In the process of the cityâs physical and ideological remaking over the decade leading up to 1992, architecture played a critical role. It functioned as a reference point which was both visual and rhetorical, as an ideological prop which sustained the project of modernity.
The triptych becomes a method to represent the city's reinvention. It provides a syntax which links the three elements in a way which is not sequential but parallel. The images are simultaneous episodes of a mechanism which produces a new vocabulary of representation. The three photographs are taken from Spaces and Sculptures, the publication by the Department of Planning and Public Works within Barcelona's local government and the catalogue to a 1987 retrospective of the city's public space program. The book constitutes one of the first intentions to articulate the identity of the modern city through a repertory of emblematic images. Each of the three chosen photographs is important not because of its specific content but because it represents a type÷a point of view which is both a position of observation and a way of seeing, an ideological stance. It is a two-fold condition in which the visual dimension of the modern city is intricately bound with its theoretical reformulation.