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Barcelona Postcard
by Amos Klausner

Greetings from Barcelona, where the weather is hot, hot, hot and the city is celebrating the Any del Disseny 2003, the year of design. Recent reports touting this cosmopolitan coastal capital of Spain's Catalun region as the new Paris may have been greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless, Barcelona continues to coalesce and magnify the best in design that Spain and the continent have to offer. A well-deserved trip during the steamy, dog days of summer brought it all into focus, from architecture and industrial design to interiors and graphics.

This year FAD, the Foment de les Arts Decoratives (Promoter of Decorative Arts) is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and has, with the assistance of the Catalan Regional Government and the Barcelona City Council, marked its centenary as the Year of Design 2003. Along with this come a dizzying number of lectures, conferences, exhibitions and celebrations throughout the city. FAD was founded in 1903 as the first association of decorative arts in Spain at the same time that modernisme, an offshoot of the art nouveau movement, was gaining prestige through the work of architects like Josep Caldafach, Lluis Domenech i Montaner and of course Antoni Gaudi. Today FAD is a conglomeration of seven professional associations representing industrial design, architecture, graphic design, arts and crafts, contemporary jewelry, fashion and accessories, and audio-visual communications. Each offers member services and a superb line-up of design related events and programs (regardless of the year).

Housed in the four hundred year old Convent dels Angels and beautifully renovated by Lluis Clotet and Ignacio Paricio, FAD entreats you to immerse yourself in design by taking in one of several ongoing exhibitions. Grafica Reactiva, a colorful look at contemporary Mexican graphic design was recently on display. An entire room of the show was dedicated to the socio-political and often humorous work that can be seen in the book Sensacional, Mexican Street Graphics. The publication includes forewards by newly anointed graphic designer and longtime musician David Byrne and design historian Steven Heller. FAD is also a great place to enjoy a simple lunch in their busy café, set directly across the plaza from the whitewashed walls of architect Richard Meier's stark and beautiful Museum of Contemporary Art.

Walking the streets of Barcelona's hip and fashionable Eixample or El Born districts you can't help notice the plethora of showrooms angling for the attention of the design cognoscenti. From Vitra to Vincon you can fill your carry-on or your bedroom with the best in international product and furniture design. One of the best showrooms in town is BD Ediciones de Diseno, founded by the same Lluis Clotet of the Convent dels Angels renovation. Clotet is no stranger to industrial design, having produced a series of trays and bowls for Alessi in the mid 1990's. Tucked into the back of BD, in a mock outdoor space plastered with advertising posters, is a new line of outdoor furniture designed by Ross Lovegrove and produced by BD called Transit. Lovegrove got his start working on products for Sony and Apple. He has since opened Studio X where he fuses advances in materials and manufacturing with an attention to ecology in the creation of soft and gentle forms. A hit at the 2002 Milan Furniture Fair, the Transit pieces are made from rotation molded polyethylene. They are 100% waterproof and dyed during manufacturing to ensure that the pieces are fade resistant. The collection is marketed under the BDLove name and includes a super-swoopy bench, a planter/seat combo, a light and a garbage bin. The furniture can be filled with sand or water to secure them in place.

North of Avenida Diagonal, the wide boulevard that cuts the city into equal halves, is Santa & Cole, a cool and classy showroom dedicated to lighting design. With two shops at street level in a quiet residential neighborhood Santa & Cole has ample space to display a wide variety of hanging and table lamps, floor lamps, sconces and more. One of the most dramatic pieces they carry is the Zettel'z series of hanging lamps by Ingo Maurer. The iconoclast started his career as a graphic designer and created his first piece of lighting in 1966. Since then his work had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cartier Foundation in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (to name a few). The Zettel'z is an explosion of paper, metal and light. Taking equal parts kitchen note pad, graphic design and lighting technology Maurer allows us to make a personal connection to his lamp the way we might with a family photo album.

If you are hungry to see the Zettel'z illuminating another stop on the Barcelona design trail, then forget the tapas and head to El Japones, a busy sushi restaurant run by Grupo Tragaluz. Known for establishing restaurants where the food is great and the interior design is even better, three of their eight restaurant properties as well as the new and highly anticipated Hotel Omm (opening fall 2003) are within a few city blocks of one another. Much of their success rests on the shoulders of interior designers Isabel López and Sandra Tarruella who are responsible for El Japones as well as Tragaluz, and Principal. For El Japones they mixed traditional Asian inspired woodwork including a long cherry wood sushi bar squeezed between walls layered in metal shingles on one side and delicate metal mesh on the other. Their work for Principal won them the Saloni Award for Interior Architecture, a 30,000 euro prize offered by the ceramic tile manufacturer. For Tragaluz, which translates as "light swallower", they worked closely with Javier Mariscal, a renowned Barcelona based graphic designer and creator of Cobi, the 1992 Olympic mascot. For this project he designed the chairs, lamps, and fittings for the glass enclosed dining area.



Barcelona's own salute to the roots of the international style gained ground in 1986 when the finishing touches were made to a reconstruction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's German National Pavilion. The pavilion was first designed and built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition held at the foot of Montjuic, the rocky mountain in the heart of the city (best known for hosting Olympic competition in 1992). When the exhibition ended, Mies' pavilion was disassembled. The importance of the project was recognized and remembered in the early 1980's. With the help of architects Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos, who researched and documented the original design, the pavilion was cloned and reborn. Today it is an ocean of tranquility and a monument to modern architecture.

Another oasis awaits visitors further up the slopes of Montjuic. Past Gae Aulenti's renovation of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (with its quirky frescos salvaged from the region's oldest rural churches) and Olympic venues designed by Arata Isozaki, Santiago Calatrava and Ricardo Bofill is a former illegal garbage dump that has been transformed into the new Barcelona Botanic Gardens. The tangled web of geometric walkways and buildings that define this steep hillside setting were designed by Carlos Ferrater, Jose Luis Canosa and Isabel Figueras. Using a repeating pattern of triangulation and materials like cement edged with oxidized corten steel, they have been able to give order to the natural rhythms and distinct differences found within this Mediterranean garden.



The most interesting new structure in Barcelona is French architect Jean Nouvel's Agbar Tower. Currently under construction in a small park pressed close the sea, the oval building is a reinforced concrete patchwork of over four thousand irregularly shaped and seemingly haphazardly placed window openings. When complete the skeleton of the building will be wrapped with a multi-colored glass skin inspired by the work of Antoni Gaudi. To watch the pierced concrete core rise into the Barcelona skyline is amazing, and it's a wonderful tease for a finished building that will stand like a mirage, reflecting the water, the mountains and the urban fabric of the city.

Even as summer starts to cool, the Year of Design is still adding heat to Barcelona's atmosphere of creativity. It's too bad these post cards are so small. With such a profound history and so many tantalizing projects starting to take shape on the Barcelona horizon it might be best to switch to an aerogramme.



Amos Klausner is the director of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

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