Barcelona to Amsterdam

On our last day in Barcelona we rose early, trekked to the subway, and made a connection to the Airport Express Bus at Placa de Catalunya.

Though this scene appears somewhat chaotic, it was not. The service runs frequently and with only a couple of stops, directly to the airport. (I am a bit surprised that with Barcelona’s extensive subway system there isn’t a line out to the airport as in Madrid). Since we had arrived from Pamplona by train we had not seen the new airport terminal. Check-in was very crowded and a bit nerve-wracking so I don’t have pictures of that hall, but the concourse is very modern and similar in concept to the one I arrived at in Madrid.

The strategy is to simply go ahead and accept very long concourses (created by the large size of the airplanes) and mitigate the length with long sections of moving walkway. As in Madrid, the moving walkways are on one side, people space in the center and services on the other side. The gates on the left are separated by those stocky towers (which provide air conditioning) and the gates on the right fall between the services. Everything is clean, simple, and well-lit. The very high ceiling with continuous skylights keeps the experience from feeling claustrophobic – often a problem in very long spaces. The various services (bathrooms below) are contained in similarly clean, simple, glass box structures – that also handle the mechanical needs on this side of the concourse.

One of the curses of public buildings, vending machines, has managed to invade the space however with the messy result above. (Personally I think the architects should have known they were coming and provided an alcove for them).

Caffe Fiore appears to also be an ‘add-on’. Its counter area is pretty cleanly done; the seating and advertising are less composed, but they do animate the space.

The travel signage continues the pattern of clarity we’ve gotten used to in Europe.

With all the glass, the views to the field are frequent and clear.

The big glass drum behind the bus is a stair that provides both emergency egress from the terminal building and access to the lower level for those gates where boarding takes place by walking across the apron.

And we’re off – next stop Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Europe’s 5th busiest, below.

Here you can see the effect of a similar organization but in less space and with a lower ceiling. With everything more compressed, some visual coherence and light are lost.

From the airport terminal we found our way to the train and headed to the main train station along the Amstel river in the center of town from which we could catch a tram out to our apartment. (a humorous note – our landlady told us later that the train actually went quite near their apartment and we hadn’t needed to go downtown at all. Ah well).

It’s a large and very busy station.

We used it several times during our stay so this view became familiar.

The building out front is more about architecture than engineering;

and the plaza is a hub for transport of all sorts. Here’s a map to give you a sense of the layout and the relationship between the central station and our apartment. It’s a real city with old canals but also modern roads (and an obvious ring road), trains, trams and millions of bicycles. The red dot in the middle of the spider’s web is the main train station and the other dot is Surinameplein, a plaza where our apartment was located. The airport is in the lower left-hand corner.

Amsterdam’s name derives from Amstelredamme which reflects that the small community that originally located here on the Amstel river had to build a dam to control water that occasionally flowed up the river from the sea. The story of how God created the world but the Dutch created Holland has been going on ever since.

But on this day we were interested in getting settled and finding lunch so we caught the tram for Surinameplein.

Here’s our apartment building from street level. It’s a type of design called the Amsterdam school, prevalent in the early 20th century when a big planning push expanded the city out into this area. It’s characterized by big block buildings accented with big vertical slabs and some audacious (for the time) cantilevers – all wrapped up in brick.

From our apartment window, some of the street pattern was more understandable.

The street going off to the right crosses a canal immediately beyond the building, so a number of streets with cars and trams and bicycles all have to funnel together since only some streets have canal bridges. It was a pretty constant flow but heavier obviously in the morning and evening. Our apartment, up two VERY steep flights of stairs was very much in the AirBnB / IKEA mode that we had seen a lot of in Spain – comfortable and simple.

Living / Dining above with an in-line kitchen to the right of the table below,

and a double doorway to the bedroom on the other side.

The bathroom was tucked behind the kitchen, off the hall.

We decided to see if we could find lunch nearby and didn’t have to go far. On the other side of our apartment building, towards the canal, there were several small ethnic restaurants  in a passageway, and to our good fortune, Cafe Oslo, facing the canal.

As is probably apparent, we weren’t in Spain anymore, the weather was cooler and people were in sweaters and jackets. But no matter, the food was good !

We’ll explore more in the next few posts.

 

 

 

 

 

Barcelona – Parc Güell

Parc Güell is a public park system composed of gardens and architectonic elements located on Carmel Hill in La Salut, a neighborhood in the Gràcia district of Barcelona (in which we were staying, just two blocks away). Count Eusebi Güell conceived of the idea of an exclusive community of houses that would be set in a garden environment inspired by the English garden city movement. He hired Antoni Gaudi to help him create the plan and design some of the buildings so that they would be in the Catalan modernisme style. The intention was to exploit the fresh air (well away from smoky factories) and beautiful views from the site, with sixty triangular lots being provided for luxury houses.

The building above is actually part of the original pair of gatehouses because the venture failed commercially and only two houses were ever built. Ultimately Güell lived in one of them and Gaudi and his family moved into the other. The entrance to the park sweeps you into the base of a flight of stairs leading up to the plaza that forms the center of the park and introduces you to the lizard that has become icon of the park – with the expected results that make it hard to photograph.

I came back a bit later in the day and waited for an opening – had to be quick.

It’s not apparent from this vantage point that there’s even a plaza in the park. What greets you is a large, apparently unprogrammed columnar structure.

It’s almost Egyptian in character.

Except, of course, for the gorgeous Spanish tile work and loaves of bread column capitals. I have heard that this area was intended to be a public market ( mercat ) for this community, which would be consistent with Barcelona’s developed market system.

The plaza sits on top of all this; but you have to take an indirect route to get there, using some of the structures that were put in place to serve the intended houses. These were designed by Gaudí as structures jutting out from the steep hillside or running on viaducts, with separate footpaths in arcades formed under these structures.

This minimized the intrusion of the roads, and Gaudí designed them using local stone in a way that integrates them closely into the landscape. His structures echo natural forms, with columns like tree trunks supporting branching vaulting under the roadway, and the curves of vaulting and alignment of sloping columns designed so that the inverted catenary arch shapes form perfect compression structures. I have to admit that intuitively these structures seem to coarse and thin to be stable – but there they are.

On the site above, the terraces flow with the contours of the hillside,

and in fact assume different characters in different locations such as this regular but still organic row of vertical columns,

or this more architectural expression with columns, capitals, and vaults.

Without any houses the site has become a romantically formalized arboretum, a wonderful place to walk and enjoy the views of the city – and eventually the plaza, reached in our case by this broad esplanade.

At this point a change from our previous visit (9 years ago) became clear. The central part of the park is now treated as a “monument” for which you have to show your ticket.

Otherwise you can wander through the gardens freely. Previously you had to buy a ticket, but then you could walk anywhere, as much as you wanted. Apparently the central area has become so popular that they use the ticketing system to meter the number of people on the plaza at any one time (the same approach used at the Sagrada Familia). Nothing quite prepares you for the plaza – because it’s so bare, a huge, flat dirt surface.

It’s definitely a see and be seen space, that would have been used for some sorts of social events had the housing project worked out, though the scale in many ways works better for today’s crowds than it would have for a modest number of families.

And then nothing prepares you, in contrast, for the detailed, tactile serpentine seating that winds around the perimeter,

seducing you into enjoying the view across the city to the Mediterranean.

Some of the tile work has been made to fit but other of it has been assembled from intentionally broken ceramic ware fitted into designs on-site.

As is apparent above, the tile wraps over the back of the seating and serves as a type of frieze above the columnar structure below,

complete with barking plaza gargoyles

From the plaza level, the gate houses also frame close-in city views of the La Salut neighborhood and give a sense of the steepness of the hillside (that we walked up and down every morning and evening).

To explore a bit, we climbed up the hill to the edge of the park.

We had to watch our steps here as these hill-climb stairs were steep and coarse, probably some short-term solution to be replaced when the housing was built. They led to the top edge of the park and views away from the center of the city.

Here it becomes clear that the city has grown out over the hills in a dramatic fashion.

It’s not really suburban in the sense of being single family housing as we know it but definitely challenges the topography in a determined way. From these upper levels we also got a more expansive look back out over the city, in this case towards the Torre Agbar on the left and Sagrada Familia on the right. If you look at the tallest crane of the church under construction, that is how tall the final tower will be when it is completed in 1926.

We wandered back down around the perimeter of the park along a path that gave us a view back into all the different levels of the park and gardens.

Not withstanding the flamboyant architecture, Parc Güell graces this part of Barcelona with a wonderful, green oasis where its neighbors can freely congregate.  There was another entry point to the monument on this side as well. No hesitation about putting a modern structure into this historic place.

This arrangement, while not as clear as the original central gateway, has the distinct advantage of spreading the tourist traffic out to several entrances and easing congestion around the site. A couple of blocks later we were back in our neighborhood.

And with a bit more downhill climbing, to our own apartment.

It was a treat to have such a world-class amenity right in ‘our’ neighborhood.

 

 

 

 

 

Barcelona – El Poblenou

On this day we decided to explore a district, El Poblenou, that we had visited once before, but to also go beyond and around it a bit. It turned out to be quite a crazy experience. We walked from our apartment (red dot on map) to a slightly different neighborhood for coffee and then caught the yellow line subway down to the Barceloneta area again. From there we took the green line surface tram to the end of the line.

The subways are pretty straightforward affairs; but the location of the stations, generally in public plazas, is well thought out. From this plaza you can take a glass enclosed elevator down to the mezzanine level, or

you can simply walk down the stairs. If you look carefully across the plaza, you can see the entrance to the parking under the plaza, another amenity pattern we saw consistently.

We didn’t typically have to wait very long for a train, which was good because the stations, while functional and clean, weren’t particularly interesting.

I did think the system graphics were clear and easy to understand.

The large band is yellow to reflect the line. The list of stations goes from one end to the other but only the part remaining for your trip is shown in yellow. The name of the station where you are standing is also highlighted in yellow, “Joanic”. Other symbols in squares show where other lines cross this one; and the white doughnut shapes indicate that you can transfer there. All pretty clear even if you don’t speak Catalan; though it does help if can speak a bit of subway. Here’s a larger view from the Barceloneta station that gives a better sense of the signage in context, as well as a sense of how they have varied the materials from station to station.

On this trip we got off at the “Ciutadella / Villa Olimpica” station where we could catch the green line tram on the surface.

It was honestly a little hard to tell how critical this line was in the scheme of things; but we discovered later that it connected a number of cultural sites and so may be mostly used as a convenience shuttle during events. In any case, it starts out in a casual setting, under a large tree arbor between the zoo and a branch of the university.

At this time in the morning we had the car pretty much to ourselves.

For this part of the trip we simply rode it to the end of the line,

at which we were also at the ‘edge’ of the city and close to some major power infrastructure that is no longer in use. The regular railroad trains also pass this way, although there’s no station at this location.

We discovered that we were on the edge of a small neighborhood, Sant Adria de Besos. It didn’t seem to have any particular identity, though the small Besos river defined one edge

and the Avinguda de la Platja the other. Along the avenue there was a row of mid-rise housing with retail at the ground floor and shady open space with occasional chairs and tables nearby – a Barcelona theme.

On the other side of the avenue, a small park was drawing a steady stream of people.

We decided to investigate and discovered, behind all the vegetation – a mall !

Apparently we were now on the edge of the suburbs where lots of people could easily drive to the mall to shop. We thought it would be fun to compare it to what we know at home.

Here’s a sampling of the interior – a pretty familiar collection of retail types.

Except for the language it all felt pretty familiar, but especially this part

On our way out we passed the outdoor cafe and its very necessary shading screen. It definitely did not feel like Barcelona in the way the cafe was just glued on the front.

We didn’t need to do any shopping so we headed back past the neighborhood to the tram

As you can see in the photo above, it appears that this is an older neighborhood that has been rebuilt along the edge of the avenue with taller more modern housing with retail at the ground floor. Not a fabulous location, but convenient by the modern tram to jobs downtown.

In this system you have to learn to use the button to open the door. So far our excursion seemed a bit ho-hum; but that was about to change. We passed back by the industrial area along the shore, with its more modern generating facilities.

And a couple of stops later got off at the east end of Avinguda Diagonal at the Parc del Fòrum, a large civic open space with an up and down history generated by the desire for an international cultural event to follow up the 1992 Summer Olympics. Here’s a Google map.

The large colorful area to the right is the park, including many triangular and parallelogram shaped buildings. Other office buildings and hotels have filled in the edges. The 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures, a 141-day international event, took place in the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB) and its surrounding venues, from May 9 to September 26, 2004. It provoked a lot of controversy in its conflicts between corporate sponsors and local cultural NGOs; so the resulting event did not flow smoothly and the site retains a somewhat erratic quality even today. The entrance near the tram stop at which we arrived was dramatic. This is a hotel across the street.

And this is an office building and a museum of natural sciences that frame the actual entrance, both dramatically exaggerated triangular forms.

The office building had an intricately developed facade.

And the museum, which had a strong abstract entrance,

also had a hard-to-figure-out open space at the ground level

along with an immediately adjacent prosaic children’s playground

Beyond these compressed activities the site simply opens up, without much direction.

Open pavilions appear to have been scattered every which way. This one had a sort of climbing and zip-line apparatus set-up inside.

But the most dramatic was a pavilion dedicated to showing a commitment to sustainable electricity generation from solar panels mounted to a huge panel structure.

It was striking and certainly appeared to be announcing something but the basic impression was that it was huge in scale – photo below – but unprogrammed.

There was an implied amphitheater on the Mediterranean side; but it was unclear how it would be used – to watch sailing races? – and of course most of the time it’s empty.

The panel support structure had an undeniable strong tectonic quality, accentuated by the strong sunlight, shadows, and view of the sky and clouds.

Turning to leave we did see a small boat marina and activity area, but again, this pavilion seemed to mostly have an accidental relationship to those activities.

We decided to trade in all this drama for the more traditional Rambla del Poblenou and see if we could find some lunch. We walked down Avinguda Diagonal, a truly ‘complete’ street in which a broad sidewalk, bicycle lanes and the tram occupy the center. I like the grass in the track right of way; but I know that the engineers do not. It seems to be working here but probably requires careful maintenance.

We came upon and spent a few minutes visiting a small garden/playground.

It was completely surrounded by a structure and planted hedge but included lots of porthole type ‘windows’ for viewing in and out as well as some steel gates at key points.

But in case you thought that we had returned to an older Barcelona, this is what was right across the avenue.

Luckily (I think) the drama seems to be focused primarily along the avenue. Once we turned the corner on to the rambla, the mood changed significantly.

Interestingly, though the scale is smaller, the concept is the same as along the avenue. Pedestrians and social activities use the center, a small one-way, one-lane roadway separates the walkway from the commercial / residential buildings, and most of the buildings contain retail at street level and 4-5 floors of housing above.

We found a restaurant for lunch, Sabores.

The menu made for interesting selection process – English on one side, Catalan the other.

and we got to see how the service works – the traffic on the one-lane street is so modest and controlled that the waitress just walks across.

Typically in Barcelona restaurants charge a service fee for serving you outdoors. Typically we were happy to pay it and enjoy the al fresco atmosphere. We strolled a bit along the rambla, noting how this traffic circle had been developed as a social space,

and observed the eclectic nature of the housing along the street, view above and below.

Rested, we decided we could handle one more bit of drama before calling it a day. We walked again down the avenue towards one of Barcelona’s landmark buildings, the Torre Agbar, the headquarters of the Barcelona water department.

It has a few nicknames, as does the tower in London that has the same shape. You can use your imagination. Beyond it we came to the new design center – in black of course –

and then beyond it an open trade mart / flea market building – basically a roof

From here we looked back to see how some of these forms go together

and then walked across the street to overview the trade mart

It was a hectic free for all display of just about anything your heart desires, all surmounted by a golden reflective ceiling to help keep the energy level up. We decided that this was a good place to wrap up our day and head back to the apartment. Here’s looking at you !

Next time: Parc Guell