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REFLECTS THE BEST OF CATALONIA

By Madelyn Miller

Barcelona has a well-earned reputation as a "happening" place--a city that's always the first with the latest. And now that the Contemporary Art Museum has been open for a year, this new museum has established itself as one of the cultural pulse points of this progressive city.

It is hard to say what's the best thing about the museum--the building itself, the art inside it, or what it's done for the city and the neighborhood.

Everyone agrees that the Contemporary Art Museum has revived the old neighborhood of Raval, a once-proud section of Old Barcelona that had become a bit run-down of late, suffering from the inner city syndrome that effects many older, larger cities with no inner city expansion space.

The museum is kind of like a modern jewel in a city that loves to reinvent itself architecturally.
The architect, Richard Meier, hopes that the museum will do for Raval what the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris did for the Marais.

The architect's style is distinctive--and if you have seen Meier's museums in Florence, Italy; Frankfurt, Germany; Los Angeles; Atlanta or Des Moines--you'll immediately identify the Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum as a Meier creation. The building is all white, inside and out, a famous Meier signature. The design is an ingenious combination of sharp lines and soft curves. Visitors enter a cylindrical lobby and move through an atrium--which Meier designed to be used for receptions and dinners-and up a ramp to three floors of exhibition space.

Light plays an especially important part in most of Meier's designs and the Barcelona museum is no exception. The glass facade gives the building an air of striking modernity. N the inside, the brilliant Mediterranean sunlight showers down from the roof on the third floor, floods the second-floor balconies, and the pours cheerfully into the rear windows on the first floor. Amazingly, though no light strike any work of art directly.

The museum's collection includes pieces by dozens of the finest Spanish and Catalonian artists, as well as Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and many others.

The relations between Art and Architecture are multiple and complex and have undergone progressive modifications throughout the course of history. Meier's solution for this site confronts us with a suggestive interplay of looks and crossed gazes that enrich the experience that each one of us might have individually of the museum.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

SPANISH TOURISM OFFICE: 305-358-1992 

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