Contemporary Architecture in Barcelona

While Barcelona was once a city of architectural tradition - designed and built by local professionals and renowned Catalan architects such as Antoni Gaudí - the contemporary urban landscape of Barcelona today is being shaped by global forces and international esthetic energies. The architects who fashioned international reputations look to Barcelona as a place of modernist experiment and architectural expression. A series of international architectural firms and celebrities - Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Ricardo Bofill, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron - have helped transform the city of Barcelona into a fascinating mix of architectural traditionalism and international modernism.

In this course, you trace the evolution of Barcelona's architecture and urban design from the birth of Modernism - symbolized at the 1929 World's Fair in Barcelona by Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion - to contemporary architectural expressions such as those from the 1992 Summer Olympics or the current building by a host of Spanish and foreign architects in Barcelona. Together, the architectural landscape of Barcelona reveals a variety of styles and discourses expressing the complexity and tensions of urban form and life in a globalized world.

Through both instructor-led onsite lectures and individual photographical research, you will explore and analyze in situ, many of the great buildings of the city of Barcelona as well as the larger urban fabric of which they are a part. Your study of Barcelona's rich store of modernist architecture, and the international legacy it has created, integrates theory-based lectures, media resources, personal reflection group discussions, architectural presentations and numerous urban field-studies.