'Stapler' museum condemned

Barcelona residents have given a contemptuous thumbs-down to a proposed new design museum in the heart of the city, complaining that it has the aesthetic allure of an office stapler.

Neighbourhood associations around the Catalan capital's central Plaza de las Glories condemn the planned building, created by one of Barcelona's most distinguished architectural practices, "for its position, its exaggerated height, its aggressive and intimidating form, and because it's badly designed."

Locals particularly object to the overhanging upper section of what they dub La Grapadora (the Stapler) and want the building removed in favour of a much smaller construction. "We cannot accept that an edifice equivalent to a nine or ten story skyscraper be plonked in the central space of the square, exploiting to the maximum what should be a green space with open views," they say in a document submitted to the city hall.

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The planned mega-museum is to house not only the furniture, lamps and utensils of Barcelona's rich design heritage, but also the contents of the city's former textile museum, which was controversially closed two years ago.

To push home their opposition, representatives of the neighbourhood associations of Sagrada Familia, Fort Pienc, Poblenou and Clot-Camp de l'Arpa, conclude with the following reproach: "Good design must eschew overbearingness, grandiloquence, impact and desire to dominate, and this building does not do any of those things."

Perpetrator of these alleged architectural crimes is none other than the MBM practice of Oriol Bohigas, grand master of Barcelona's spectacular transformation from the dingy, miserable backwater of the Franco years to the sassy, user-friendly design triumph it became during the 1980s and 1990s.

When the world's architects flocked to Barcelona during Spain's transition to democracy, agog to discover the secret of the city's urban renaissance, they were told that key to success was listening to neighbourhood associations, blending their small local projects into a sympathetic grand design. Depersonalised horrors like London's Docklands, built with no regard for the wishes of people who lived and worked there, or the anarchic chaos of Madrid, would thereby be avoided, journalists were informed.

During Franco's dictatorship, Barcelona's local residents associations were among the few political spaces where democracy could sprout. Here future leaders like Pascual Maragall, hand in hand with sympathetic architects like Mr Bohigas, Josep Martorell and their Scottish collaborator David Mackay, developed - then enacted - their revolutionary urban blueprint during Mr Maragall's subsequent 26 years as mayor.

Accustomed for decades to being heard, residents are now furious at being sidelined. "The city hall has closed ranks around this project, in a process that has been purely informative, instead of one of participation," complained Miquel Catasus, urbanism spokesman of Clot-Camp de l'Arpa Residents Association, to Barcelona's daily La Vanguardia yesterday.

Residents want an independent study of the landscape impact of what they call a "bunker" that overwhelms its surroundings.

Opposition has also come from the region's fashion industry, whose leaders have called for fashion and fabrics to have their own museum in a region that once matched Lancashire as a textile manufacturer and exporter, with Barcelona its Manchester.

More than 50 leaders of Catalan fashion, including the couturiers Manuel Pertegaz, Antoni Miro and Josep Font, signed a manifesto last week condemning the closure two years ago of the Barcelona Textile and Clothing Museum. That museum, which opened in 1968, assembled a world class collection of works by Balenciaga, Paco Rabanne and Azedine Alaia until it was closed prior to being absorbed into the proposed new design museum.

The new museum, set to open in 2011, will house a vast gamut of disciplines, including graphic design and communication, fashion, product design and architecture in 25,000 square metres of floor space. The architects defend their 88m-euro project, set to open in 2011.

"It's compact, with few entrances? very metallic, of aluminium or zinc, but anyway a material that is brilliant without being blinding," Mr Bohigas said recently. "It will occupy the minimum space possible," he conceded, since it is surrounded by houses, and has a tramway passing one of its doors.

"It's important that it be a tall building, to signal that there's a museum at this spot," MBM's Mr Martorell added. But Barcelona's design-conscious residents remain unimpressed "Bohigas is a good architect but they should have announced an international competition," wrote one blogger yesterday. "This looks like a multi-storey carpark."