| Barcelona, 1974. One year before the death of the Spanish dictator Franco, a group of intellectuals, most of them architects and with a past of political resistance, started an independent "little magazine" entitled Arquitecturas Bis. The main protagonist of Arquitecturas Bis was the architect, educator and writer Oriol Bohigas. Its editorial board included also some of the most prominent Spanish designers and educators, such as Rafael Moneo, Helio Pinon, or Manuel de Sola-Morales, as well as the philosopher Tomas Llorens, at the time in exiled in England. When the magazine ceased publication, in 1985, some of its editors had become pivotal agents of a radical process of preservation, renewal and transformation of the city of Barcelona that would culminate in the 1992 Olympic games. This dissertation argues that Arquitecturas Bis was the intellectual forum that engendered and nourished this transformation. Thus one could argue that Arquitecturas Bis went from publication to public action.;Arquitecturas Bis negotiated the Catalan theoretical consensus on strategies of urban renewal and promoted the historical interest on the city that informed those strategies. It also bridged the academia and the public realm and showcased architectonic models as possible materials for the transformation of the city, delivering them to public scrutiny. The strategy of public address enacted by the magazine was instrumental in focusing attention and providing the interpretative models that enabled the successful reception of Barcelona's urban transformation. Thus, Arquitecturas Bis, both in itself and through the analyses of its reception, is a privileged object to explore the intellectual history of what may be judged as the most successful urban renewal of the last 30 years. |
