Santa Caterina Market

From the Barcelona Cathedral, an undulating, brightly coloured roof catches our eye. Attracted like insects to a colourful flower, we approach to discover a food market below the roof: the Santa Caterina Market. The original design of the building, as well as the treasure trove of produce displayed on its stalls, won’t disappoint visitors to the neighbourhood of Santa Caterina.

Santa Caterina Market X

The spacious, modern market building was constructed on the former site of the Convent of Santa Caterina, from which it takes its name. During the post-Civil War period, Santa Caterina became the main food supplier to the towns on the outskirts of Barcelona. People from Sant Adrià, Santa Coloma and Mataró came on the tram to buy food in this market in times of shortage.

(...) The design commission went, in 1997, to the highly imaginative Catalan practice EMBT, the husband and wife team of Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue.

Construction took so very long not because of political wrangling and rows over cash, but because of a combination of a complex brief and what was unearthed here.

The architects were asked to squeeze together the revived market, the plan of which was constantly changing, a museum, two blocks of 59 low-rent social housing for senior citizens, an ambitious underground car park for articulated lorries serving the market and 250 cars together with an "organic waste depository" for the Santa Caterina and La Ribera districts of the city centre. All of which is rather like being asked to erect a circus Big Top in the kitchen while builders are busy working on the rest of your house. And the garden shed, too.

Somehow, all these disparate elements fit together happily, as these things do in Barcelona; but, to make life more difficult, and interesting, for everyone involved, building works on the market uncovered the foundations of a substantial Dominican monastery that had been torched by anti-clerical Catalan revolutionaries in 1835.
Alongside these were the remains of what is thought to be the first wholly Gothic church in the city, dating from 1241, and, to keep the archaeologists digging, ruins of a late Roman necropolis. The market nailing a lid on these ghosts of the city's past was built between 1844 and 1848. A century and a half later, this building was creaking like some antique ship well past her sail-by date, which is where EMBT came to the stuttering, halting rescue. (...) (The Guardian)

 

EMBT has received many accolades for their management of the historic building’s renovation. In addition to leaving some parts of the remaining apse of the monastery exposed, the architects were determined to take advantage of the original structure in order to preserve its historic relevance. As residents of the neighborhood themselves, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliablue were determined to “regenerate” the dilapidated market instead of completely demolishing the building, something so often seen in historic centers of European cities.

As the architects explain in their brief, “The first mistake is to talk about old and new. Whatever has managed to survive into the present is current, useful, and contemporary. And it permits us to move back in time in order to continue forward.”

Santa Caterina Market X

The rehabbed building reflects more than just the passing of time; it breathes movement and colorful vibrancy, inside and out. The undulating roof is the immediate eyecatcher as it hovers, magic carpet-style, over the large plaza that surrounds the market. The colorful mosaic is made up of 325,000 hexagonal Spanish ceramic tiles that create a textured field of flowers suspended in midair.
EMBT kept the original white masonry walls with multiple arched openings on three sides. The fourth side was reimagined to open into a plaza surrounded by social housing buildings that were also part of the urban renewal plan. Much of the second story exterior is covered in awkwardly hung movable shutters – one of the many playful touches typical of an EMBT design.

Today, Barcelona’s Santa Caterina Market is a busting hub of activity set in a modern design that pays homage to the building’s origins. By editing the existing features of the market, EMBT adeptly gave life back to an aging icon and boosted the local culinary economy as well. Mixing Spanish tradition with a funky design and fresh food is a fitting tribute for this cosmopolitan city, one of the culinary capitals of the world. 

(buildipedia)

The refurbishment of Barcelona’s first covered food market was completed in 2005. The old Santa Caterina food market revealed a gleaming, undulating and brightly coloured roof designed to be seen from the air. The roof is attached to the building by a wooden structure, and a vast mosaic of coloured ceramic pieces, representing fruit and vegetables, boldly breaks with the traditional look of a market. The market has always been characterised by a desire to innovate. Santa Caterina Market was built in 1845 to provide the neighbourhood’s blue-collar community with foodstuffs. (barcelonaturisme).

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