Barcelona

In the 21st century c/ Cristóbal de Moura, a street conceived in the 19th century, will be built. Cerdà’s project is brought to conclusion and with it the city of Barcelona will be physically completed. In one of the last sites for building on we set out to consider how a street in the digital city ought to be. That it should be sensitive to the new information technologies, in order to create a hybrid environment, both real and virtual. On the other hand, if the physical space ignores the presence of the construction of other worlds it risks imitating that image in William Gibson’s Neuromancer in which special glasses make the world seem dynamic, luminous, fantastic, while the physical reality, the inhabitable environment, the real city is decaying, dark, dangerous... Barcelona, with its tradition of designing the urban space, is a good place to start to ensure that this does not happen.

The street is organized on the pattern generated by lines of movement that pass through a series of wooded groves. The trees are fruit-bearing. A wire-frame tree is an instrument sensitive to the human presence. The Sport Rocks provide a recreational amenity in the urban space. The water emerges from the subsoil to serve to control the climate and have images projected onto it. The photovoltaic trees that shade the street produce energy and its fruit of light. The optical fibre lights in the ground accompany the movement of the pedestrians and can be used to change the direction of vehicle traffic in the streets. A new street.

Project: 1998
Client: City of Barcelona
Site: C/ Cristobal de Mora (Barcelona) Spain

Design team: Vicente Guallart, Max Sanjulian
Model: Cristine Bleichter
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