However,
the growth of the city made it extend beyond its walls, and the civil
engineer Ildefons Cerdà was in charge of designing the stretch of
urban network which would link these isolated villages with the walled
enclosure.
This project
was called l´Eixample
(the expansion) or the Cerdà project.
For this area Ildefons Cerdà had planned a series of buildings set
out in a square shape (square blocks with chamfered corners, the so-called
grids which occupy approximately 114x114m), linked by a network of
streets, some parallel with and others perpendicular to the sea, with
a width of 20m between the buildings.
The
current Eixample is made up
of 372 blocks which occupy an area of 745ha. It was recently split
into the Eixample Dret (Right
Eixample) and Eixample Esquerra
(Left Eixample). The Eixample Dret is the so-called Golden
Square where the modernist architects have left the best
of their work.
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Modernism
