Barcelona Travel Emergency: Toward an Architecture of Tourism

EVDS welcomes Rafael Gómez-Moriana to campus for a guest lecture exploring architecture’s fundamental value-shift from production to consumption, from the everyday to tourism, and from mass-culture to élite culture using recently built works as examples. Summary: Barcelona is now the fourth most visited city in Western Europe after London, Paris, and Rome, even though it’s significantly smaller than these capital cities. Two decades of spectacular tourism growth, mainly visitors to built works by Gaudí and other Modernistas but also recent and contemporary works, is provoking important changes in the urban ecology of that city. Heritage has become such a tourist attraction in Barcelona that many buildings are today designed effectively as tourist attractions, such that the city is essentially shifting from ‘a tourism of architecture’ to ‘an architecture of tourism’. Barcelona is not alone, of course, its shift reflecting what is in fact a larger cultural transformation occurring in many cities throughout the world. Once mostly sites of production, cities are increasingly becoming places of consumption. Barcelona is a good example: in the 19th century, its many textile mills garnered it the sobriquet “Manchester of the South”, but today it is seen as one of the foremost destinations for consumers of gastronomy, art, fashion and design.

Location:

Professional Faculties building – Room 2160

Speaker:

Rafael Gómez-Moriana is a Barcelona-based architect, writer and educator locally managing the EVDS Barcelona term-Abroad Program. He is a graduate of the University of Waterloo as well as the Berlage Institute, and has taught at University of Manitoba, Carleton University, and the Metropolis Master Program on Architecture and Urban Studies of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. His writings have been published in magazines such as OnSite Review, Canadian Architect, Lotus, Log, and Mark Magazine, to which he contributes regularly, as well as in several books, most recently the collection of essays Critical Juncture. His blog can be read at criticalista.com.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/barcelona-travel-emergency-toward-architecture-tourism