41.3826°N / 2.1771°E · Spain
Barcelona is the one great city whose map is first of all a grid. The Eixample unrolls square blocks one hundred and thirteen metres on a side, each of the four corners folded back into a fifteen-metre chamfer, and that grid stops dead against the old town.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
The streets of the Eixample are twenty, thirty or sixty metres wide, and they are laid parallel and perpendicular to the sea so that every façade takes the sun during the day. This is not a plan of prestige, it is a calculation about sunlight. And beware of a common phrase: the blocks are not octagonal, they are square. The octagon is the junction formed by four chamfers facing one another.
The grid is held between two limits: the tangle of the Ciutat Vella on the sea side, the ridge of Collserola on the land side, across a plain some five kilometres wide. The frame has to hold both, or the grid looks endless and loses its meaning. Three great diagonals cut through it, the Diagonal, the Meridiana and the Parallel, joined by the later incision of Via Laietana, eleven hundred metres driven in a straight line through the old town between 1907 and 1926. Two accidents finally break the regularity: Montjuïc, the one rise at the end of the port, and the triangle of narrow blocks of La Barceloneta, pointed out into the sea.
Two values are enough, and the temptation of contrast has to be resisted. The buildings in a warm greyed ochre, the streets left to the ground: the grid draws itself through its chamfers, it needs no underlining at all. Keep the darkest value for the Mediterranean, which is the one large continuous field in the composition, and the only possible counterweight to a grid this insistent.
Portrait. The city is a strip caught between water and mountain, and the frame has to hold both limits: without them the grid looks endless and loses its meaning. The sea at the bottom, the Eixample in the centre, the edge of Collserola at the top. The coast runs at an angle in the frame and will never be a horizontal: keep enough water for that slant to look intended. Hold the Ciutat Vella and the Diagonal in the same field too, because it is their proximity that tells the city. Montjuïc closes the bottom left.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a carrer, a date, the name of a quarter: that line is what turns a plan of Barcelona into your plan of Barcelona.
Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.
Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.
It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.
It is neither a boulevard nor an avenue, and that is why it winds through a city otherwise so regular. La Rambla was the bed of a torrent, dry most of the year, which drained the rains of Collserola and separated the walled town from the Raval. The watercourse was diverted outside the new walls around 1440, and the promenade took its place over one and a fifth kilometres. The word comes from the Arabic for sand, and means a wadi in Catalan.
La Barceloneta is the work of the engineer Juan Martín Cermeño, on a project of 1749, built from 1753 on ground slowly won from the sea: first a breakwater, then the islet of Maians, held the sand brought by the currents. Its streets are laid to the line, fifteen running one way and nine across, cutting narrow rectangular blocks. They were wanted that way for two reasons: to ventilate the quarter, and to keep clear the line of fire of the artillery on the walls.
Ildefons Cerdà’s plan sets blocks of one hundred and thirteen point three metres on a side, their corners truncated by a fifteen-metre chamfer, and streets of twenty, thirty and sixty metres. The walls had been pulled down by royal order of 9 August 1854, and Isabella II laid the first stone of the Eixample on 4 September 1860. The extension zone covers eleven hundred hectares.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The chamfer where you waited, the street that runs down to the sea, the junction whose midday shade you knew. The grid is the same for everyone. Where you stop inside it is not.
Compose my Barcelona poster
