Twelve years ago, in February 2011, the journalist Silvia Angulo explained in the pages of La Vanguardia the confirmation of the commitment acquired by the Barcelona City Council in the year Cerdà (2009-2010) to erect a monument to the visionary of the Eixample in a square de las Glòries occupied then by the now disappeared ring road. Yesterday, the Barcelona City Council, pressured by the imminent ban on inaugurations and presentations imposed by the electoral regulations, recovered that old promise and announced the call for an international competition to commission the design of that pending monument. Will this time be the charm?
The memory of the person and the work of the road engineer that now everyone dares to reinterpret will consist of "an artistic intervention to spread the figure and the urban project" that he designed for the city, according to the agreement signed by the City Council, the Association of Road, Canal and Port Engineers of Catalonia (Ildefons Cerdà's guild) and the Association of Architects of Catalonia.
The monument will be in Plaza de las Glòries, where Cerdà drew the new center of Barcelona, now in full urban transformation.
This will not be the first monument that Barcelona will dedicate to Cerdà. The previous one was lost in the citizen's memory and in some municipal warehouse where some of its rubble may still rest.
It was installed in 1959 by order of the Francoist mayor José María de Porcioles at the start of the Castelldefels motorway, in the place that would later occupy Plaza Cerdà. The modular composition, the work of the municipal architect Antoni M. Riera i Clavillé, had a describable success: in 1971 it was withdrawn and never heard from again.
Other much earlier attempts, such as the allegorical project by Pere Falqués for the intersection of Paseo de Gràcia with Ronda Sant Pere –which the press of the time reported on in May 1889– did not even see the light of day. As Lluís Permanyer recounted (La Vanguardia, May 28, 2009), the mayor Rius i Taulet, overwhelmed by the debt of the Universal Exhibition of 1888, backed down when the first stone had already been laid.
