Week 4: Technology

Technology was a key aspect of Barcelona's 1888 Exposició Universal. As mentioned in previous weeks' posts, one of the fair's main purposes was to prove to the rest of Europe Barcelona's industrial advancement and economic viability: this goal was manifested in the massive size and prominent position of the Gran Palau de la Indústria (Grand Palace of Industry), which showcased Spain's latest technological and industrial achievements. However, a broader-reaching and perhaps more powerful statement of the city's adaptation to and incorporation of technology is Barcelona's outfitting its major thoroughfares with streetlamps.

Barcelona, which had risen as an industrial center based on water and steam power, was just turning the corner into the electric age. As journalists Josep Maria Huertas Claveria and Jaume Fabre have described: "The houses were lit by lanterns and candles, cooking was done on coal ovens, and there was no other type of energy. Clothes had to be washed in public basins that worked well into the twentieth century." [1] This was exactly the image of a backward nation that Spain and Catalonia were trying to overturn. Thus, the advent of electric lighting on the streets of the old and new sections of Barcelona represented a true shift into modernity, and the 1888 Exposition was held to be the catalyst, if not the agent. Electricity in homes and true modernity for the entire city were soon to follow. [2]

In 1888, electric lighting was installed along Las Ramblas (a former stream and, functionally, open sewer running through the old city, which had been covered over earlier in the century and turned into a main road) and the Gran Vía de les Corts Catalanes (a main avenue through the new part of the city, begun only a couple of decades earlier). This represented the modernization of the old center, and the realization of the utopic expansion zone of the city, still largely undeveloped. Both of these developments were important to show the rest of Europe, but also for the Catalan bourgeoisie, from whom Barcelona was finally becoming a city of which they could be proud.

[1] Huertas Claveria, Josep Maria and Fabre, Jaume. Quoted in "Fi de segle, principi de segle: L'Exposició de 1888" at www.bcn.es. Accessed 2 Oct 2011. http://www.bcn.es/publications/bcn_escultures/info/capitol1.html. Translation mine: "Les cases estaven il·luminades amb quinqués i espelmes, on es cuinava fent servir fogons de carbó i no es disposava de cap altre tipus d'energia. La roba s'havia de rentar als safareigs públics que van funcionar fins ben entrat el segle XX."

[2] "Fi de segle, principi de segle: L'Exposició de 1888" at www.bcn.es.