I really love St Grada Familia, such a unique cathedral!
cathedral
Basilica, technically. As I understand it you can only have one cathedral per city, for some bureaucratic and / or religious reason, and Barcelona already had one. 🤷♂️
I think it’s for balancing purposes. It would be too OP if Spain could build as many cathedrals as they wanted in a city and stack culture bonuses.
Specifically, this is Eixample
The roads in the old city are much more chaotic.
The church built 141 years ago makes everything around it boring and droll. Why don’t we design and build amazing architecture any more?
It’s certainly unique and all, but a little too “samey” for my liking.
Too samey and zero trees. I would go crazy without trees and grass!
There are trees on the sidewalks.
What’s up with the blue vs yellow light?
HPS vs LED lamps. LED are blue compared to HPS.
Yeah but why are there two types of lights in one city?
New vs old.
where are the trees?
On the sidewalks; hard to see in that light, and the picture might have been taken in autumn or winter, but I replied elsewhere in the thread with a picture showing how many of them there actually are (or just look up pictures with the keyword “eixample” and you’ll find there’s actually quite a bit of green between the blocks).
(And also parks, of course; there’s two of them in the picture right next to the basilica, but, again, in this yellow light you can’t see the green.)
Anyone else, for a split second, have the wrong perspective and see a weird tower with futuristic space-castle on top of it?
I do now!
Why are there two streets running against the grid?
The one going straight to the basilica is Gaudí Avenue, named after Antoni Gaudí, the architect who designed the Sagrada Família (as well as other landmarks like Park Güell, Casa Milà / La Pedrera, or Casa Batlló); it was designed to connect the two landmarks of the Sagrada Família and the former Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (today a UNESCO world heritage site).
The one in the background is Diagonal Avenue (no, really), one of the main thoroughfares in the city, intended by Ildefons Cerdà (designer of the Eixample) to cut through his grid layout together with Meridiana Avenue (which roughly follows the Paris meridian, or rather the Barcelona-Dunkerke one; there’s also the perpendicular Paral·lel Avenue, of course, though sadly they don’t cross), crossing at the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, which Cerdà intended to become the new city centre (alas, the Plaça Catalunya, some 17 blocks to the south, ended up taking that role).
From Cities Skylines experience it’s usually to relieve traffic blocks by providing a direct path to areas/landmarks that have a higher than average traffic load. Not sure why they did it though.
That sounds like a reasonable explanation, but I’d have thought that Barcelona was laid out far before the advent of modern city planning.
Eixample was built in the mid-1800s iirc, and they did put some thought into its construction.
City planners: hnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg
Is this the whole city or just the same poster neighborhood again and again? I can’t imagine the ancients having the same building codes for wage earners as they do now.
This is only Eixample, the entire city does not look like this.
