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Pèrgoles de l'Avinguda Icària
Historic information
The pergola walkway designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós in 1992, is fully in keeping with the idea of making the Olympic Village a modern neighbourhood with its own personality. The fact that the site was occupied by a vast underground waste collector, meant that trees couldn’t be planted on the avenue. After the commission had been confirmed, the chosen team of architects designed a series of structures resembling a typical Catalan carnival procession featuring people in giant costumes, with metal tree-like structures standing 4 metres high which would integrate the walkway with its surrounding buildings. The bold proposal was finally rejected and redesigned as it can be seen today.
The painted steel and wood pergolas are a symbiosis of vegetation and steel, a hybrid of nature and architecture, which give an avant-garde urban feel to the central artery of the Olympic Village. These tree-like structures with their twisting and bending branches, glitter in the sunlight and give shade to the avenue. The avenue has the feel of a performance space and in the summer the pergolas form an unusual backdrop for the many skaters who pass below them.
In order to know the zone better
Barcelona took advantage of a major event like the 1992 Olympic Games to transform a large area of the city, just as it had done for the great exhibitions of 1888 and 1929. This time it chose a seafront site consisting of plots of land previously occupied by old factories, many of them in disuse, and a railway line. The Olympic Village was designed to provide accommodation for the athletes and provided the perfect excuse to bring Barcelona and the sea closer together. The area underwent a complete transformation. In addition to the 2,000 new flats, the former promenade, the Passeig Marítim, was totally refurbished to connect the Barceloneta district with the Olympic Marina. Improvements were made to the road and railway network, making it possible to reclaim a number of beaches for the community, and a number of parks were created, among them the Parc de Carles I, which covers an area of 5.5 hectares. In addition to the residential area designed by several prestigious architects, the Olympic Marina is also an important addition to the site. Designed according to a quadrangular ground plan it features a 500 metre-long curved breakwater which people can walk along. The Olympic Marina is renowned for its leisure facilities, restaurants, bars and shops. The two skyscrapers, the Mapfre Tower and the Hotel Arts, tower spectacularly over the marina and have become true city landmarks.
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