Living in Barcelona is like living in a museum. Take a walk in a new neighbourhood and you will come across a real castle with a tiled roof and round towers; look out the window and you will see the Sagrada Familia; go to a cheese shop and you will pass the largest stadium in Europe, Camp Nou. In general, everywhere you look, there are carved balconies, impressive stucco, beautiful stained glass windows, fountains, statues and squares..... But the best thing is not even that. It's that this open-air museum is simply immense! Barcelona is like a magic box, and the beauty and surprises never end.
Here, for example, is a surreal project by architect Ricardo Bofill called Walden7. This is (think about it!) an apartment building on the outskirts of Barcelona. But it looks more like a spaceship or a fantasy castle.
It was built in 1974 and, despite its complicated appearance, it solves the basic problems of an apartment block. The 16-storey building has 18 towers, a surface area of 31,140 square metres, 446 apartments and more than a thousand residents. It also has green spaces, recreational areas and several swimming pools.
Curiously, one of Walden 7's main advantages has become its main disadvantage. The point is that the idea behind the project was to create a new model of social housing.
Bofill's team wanted to create a vertical city with shops, services, houses - in short, everything you need to live comfortably. In this way, people could live more cohesively and admire the surrounding nature, rather than populating it with new buildings, asphalt and infrastructure. But the idea "did not catch on", and only one building remains as a reminder, which we can see today.
The building is striking: a huge, massive structure, all angular, chubby and textured. Almost every apartment in the building opens onto an external and internal courtyard, which confirms the title of functional building, with a complex system of bridges and balconies on several levels that are easy to navigate. The main courtyard, located at the entrance of the building, is an extension of the street and the square for the use of the residents.
Outsiders are not allowed to enter the building. But of course, if you really want to, you can always sneak in with the residents of the building. If you are lucky, they will not only open the door for you, but also tell you what it is like to live in such an unusual place. In general, you will see with your own eyes that life here is no different from any other place in the centre of Barcelona: people drying their things in the corridors, cluttering the passageways, tearing out carpets, decorating the balconies with plants. But all this takes place in a more graphic and serene setting, without too much noise or colour.
If you're a little tired of the classic sights and want to see Barcelona from a different angle, Walden 7 might just be your ticket to a new 2-hour adventure. Save the address and don't let it stop you from exploring and wondering!
HOW TO GET THERE
This building is located in the north-west of Barcelona, in a place called Sant Just Desvern. It takes 45 minutes to get there from Plaza Catalunya with one transfer. See the map here.
