The years before the Olympic Games, the city was a hive of projects and dreams. We were leaving behind that gray Barcelona at the end of the Franco era, where Passeig de Gràcia was dominated by banking entities that had been pushing aside local businesses. Those that gave it character. It was not yet that luxurious ride that it has become in recent years, nor was our modernism still praised throughout the world. And, unlike the Rambla, our beloved promenade did not house any of the great historical cultural facilities that we have.
Today, when we are celebrating its 200th anniversary, with the desire to once again place it at the center of the city's life and recover it for the people of Barcelona, it is time to value it as a strategic enclave to admire its modernist architecture.
The curious thing about the case is that it is those same modernist buildings, born with the decline of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th century, that today are marking a new way of exhibiting our heritage through technology. In just a few years, those responsible have gone from showing these buildings with nineteenth-century heritage formulas and a traditional look, in which the emphasis was placed on recovering furniture and utensils from the period, to taking a leap of a century and, with the help of technology immersive, offering a reinterpretation of that heritage in line with the times we live in.
Perhaps the most paradigmatic case is that of Casa Batlló and its Despertar project, which began in 2012, from which point those responsible have not stopped innovating with the help of technological devices and augmented reality. They have enriched the visit to the point of explaining, not only how they lived in that habitat at the beginning of the 20th century, but they have complemented it by generating content with internationally renowned artists in the spaces of the house itself, placing it as a reference for creation. more contemporary. At the same time, they have used spectacular mappings, projections of light and color on the façade, which have further highlighted its structural beauty.
The mapping by renowned artist Refik Anadol, which we were all able to enjoy recently, was not only a work of art that was formalized in an NFT, but also revealed the uniqueness of the modernist building, its history linked to the city and its magical evocations , including his feverish dragon.
The images published by the media went around the world and certified that, in Barcelona, in its apple of contention, artistic projects are carried out with cutting-edge technology by artists like Anadol, who is currently exhibiting at the MoMA in New York. All of this is a very good example of how technology enhances our historical heritage and places the modernism of Passeig de Gràcia as a great cultural focus of the city.
