The melon was opened last Monday by Ada Colau during the ceremony organized in memory of Oriol Bohigas at the Saló de Cent. He said that there will be a street, square or park dedicated to that great lover of Barcelona who was Bohigas. He didn’t say avenue or promenade, and it’s a shame, because the bohiguista community, much broader than it might seem at first, has knocked on the mayor’s door with daring ideas, of those that test if this city has arrests or simply barks but does not bite. Sooner or later it will be known if the melon is sweet or its flavor is sweet. Meanwhile, here are, served with apostilles, some of the proposals more or less on the table.
Bohigas was, as has been insisted these days, the man with a thousand masks, an intellectual with positions for everything. He was, for example, a republican in word and deed, and the proof is that his intervention was decisive for Barcelona to replicate in 1992 in the Parc de la Clota the Pavilion of the Republic that Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa erected in Paris in 1937, which was the first house of Picasso’s ‘Gernika’. It is because of that attachment to the tricolor flag of the deceased that one of the proposals consists of unloading a king or similar from the street map of the city.
Defuse
The first on the list is Juan de Borbónwhich has a great walk overlooking the harbor waters. Perhaps it went unnoticed by the public who attended the tribute to, but in that sort of hand program that awaited the attendees on the benches of the Saló de Cent there was a hidden clue that pointed in that direction. In that program there were phrases from famous people that Bohigas had commented on at one point or another in his life. Among them, one of Santiago Carrillo stood out for being fitted with a shoehorn. “Don Juan is the most illustrious zero to the left in Spanish history & rdquor;. That Barcelona has such a neat walk as that dedicated to the father of Juan Carlos I and grandfather of Felipe VI should attract more attention than it does, although, to be fair, the gazetteer of this city, sitting on the couch , is an indecipherable psyche.
The opportunity for Joan de Borbó’s walk to become Oriol Bohigas’s would be justified by one of his contributions to this city, the opening to the sea that he acted on the occasion of the Olympic Games, although, being, like him, ‘torracollons’, It is worth remembering that after the fall of the sheds that prevented the view of the waters, the folly of building that gigantic covering cube that was the Imax cinema came and, later, the construction of a private and inaccessible marina that acts as a showcase on the excesses of some of the great fortunes of the world, yachts of colossal dimensions before which, as a consolation, you can only remember what he said one day Jorge Luis Borges, that luxury seemed vulgar to him.
Within the category of monarchs to give up their place, the Bohiguistas have suggested another name, that of Carlos I, who has a park at the gates of the Vila Olímpica, another of his inheritances, and that probably most do not come to mind because of its name, but because of one of the sculptures that decorate it, a unique monument dedicated simply to the ass. This is precisely what its author, Eduardo Úrculo, a great figure of pop-art, baptized, ‘El Culo’. Dedicating that park to Bohigas would be, in any case, a comfortable solution, since it does not involve the headache of changing postal addresses, the main stumbling block in this type of situation.
Before continuing with three more proposals and a couple of suggestions put on the air by whoever signs this in case it is expensive, it is convenient to open, first, a very brief parenthesis to remember that, indeed, the municipal regulation establishes that five years must pass after death to dedicate a street to someone, but that law has its exception. In the event that the deceased had obtained the City Medal while alive, the quarantine period, wisely established so that no hot decisions are made, is suspended.
There is a proposal that, what things are, was born dead, explain the sources consulted. Dedicating Icària Avenue to Bohigas might seem natural, since it is the backbone of the neighborhood that lit up the 1992 Olympic Games, but the bohiguistas themselves fear that the architect’s specter will appear angry if they do so, because, apparently in life he liked to talk about the neighbors of that neighborhood as the Icarians, as if they were really followers of the teachings of the utopian socialist Étienne Cabet, to whom we must not deny that he wanted to create communities in the world in which, under the common name of Icària, book societies of all power would develop.
The list continues, although with serious doubts, with the Rambla del Raval, in this case due to the efforts that Bohigas put into different stages of his life to rescue the central district of Barcelona, Ciutat Vella, from urban rottenness. Although executed in the time of Joan Clos as mayor, the opening of the Rambla del Raval it was an idea insistently theorized by Bohigas already in the days of Pasqual Maragall. In this case, the handicap is that, although it was difficult for him to wake up, the Rambla del Raval is today an avenue with a vibrant life that is perhaps inseparable from its name.
That the Plaza Reial, in which he believed so much that he made it his home for 32 years of his life, was renamed the Plaza de Oriol Bohigas may seem a supposed ’boutade’, like those that the honoree himself was accused of pronouncing, but in defense of that option there is only one possible argument, and that is that Reial or Real has not always been his name. Between 1931 and 1939 it was the Plaza de Francesc Macià. It is said.
From here, everything remains in the hands, of course, of the criteria of the municipal government, heir to the best of Barcelona’s erratic trajectory in this matter. It seems difficult to overcome the embarrassment of dedicating the square in his honor to Ildefons Cerdà. Antoni Rovira i Trias, who was his great rival in the ideas competition for the Eixample, has a square in Gràcia, much smaller, true, but cuter, with even a statue of Rovira himself sitting on a bench and holding a Plaque on the ground that recalls what the radial city that he imagined was like and that was never possible because, with good judgment, he imposed the name of Cerdà.
The easy and reliable thing for the competent authorities will be, if it is the case, to resort to an interior of a block, the anything goes of the street, a mixed bag in which, to fit, even Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, has gotten into, which would be little less than dilute (never so well said) the figure of Bohigas in the gazetteer of the city.
Desecrate
To conclude. The gazetteer’s office website has an open tab as a suggestion box, which invites you to propose from this reckless ‘barceloneando’ section, some more idea to pay tribute to Bohigas. The first, for that of dismantling the street map, would be to put an end to that nonsense which is the fact that Fernando VII, a king of whom more than one historian could argue with solid arguments that he was an asshole, has been awarded one of the most beautiful streets in the city, Ferran, no matter how much in an attempt to disguise such infamy the name of that road was catalanized in 1910.
Second proposal, desecrate the gazetteer. That is an immense field in which to till.
For example. Does someone who wrote that “All malice is very small compared to the malice of the woman: she will be the lot that will fit the sinner in punishment of his evil deeds & rdquor;, and that he maintained that “not only women have been the cause of such great calamities in kingdoms and nations, but also in Religion, so that heresiarchs and their heresies have always been accompanied by women & rdquor ;. It was Father Antonio María Claret, confessor of Elizabeth II and a saint since her canonization in 1950, but who already had his street, first as a blessed, in the wave of street baptisms that Francoism imposed in 1939. He was also a convinced advocate that women must accept domestic abuse with resignation. “As a good Christian, you will suffer and be silent, and thus you will disarm your husband … & rdquor ;.
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It can be argued, and with good reason, that in a perimeter street of the Eixample like that one, it does not make much sense for the name of Bohigas to appear. In agreement. This absurdity could be corrected with another street of clerical resonances, that of the Cardinal Casañas, another illustrious of the city, of whom it is always remembered that he survived an anarchist attack on Christmas Day 1905 and, on the contrary, his sympathies for the more retrograde Carlism are bordered. In his role as an architect, Bohigas, through the MBM studio, was the author of that side door that opens the call to that street Palau Nou de la Rambla and that forms a perfect frame for the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria del Pi, as seen from the Rambla.
Final postscript. Heard over there. They could dedicate the hard square par excellence of this city to him, that of the Països Catalans, the main access to the Sants station, but it is a matter of paying homage to him, not to reopen old discussions of this city.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com