Market forces: extolling the virtues of fresh food and a sense of community, Barcelona's Santa Caterina market takes its place in the dynamic of urban life.

Locked into the dense urban texture of Barcelona's Barri Gotic, close to the city's main medieval cathedral, lies Santa Caterina market. Tenaciously occupying the same site since the nineteenth century, it is the oldest covered market in the city and its recent radical remodelling by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT) marks another stage in its long civic and commercial evolution. From the tourist precincts of the cathedral plaza, Santa Caterina's revitalised presence is marked by the ripple and heave of a roof plane and the kaleidoscopic flash of ceramic tiles. Daily, it beckons legions of locals equipped with sturdy shopping trolleys into its soaring vaults, filled with gleaming stalls laden with a mind-boggling range of comestibles. Vats of olives, rows of pungent cheeses, dangling hams, mounds of shellfish, regiments of eggs; here are feasts for all the senses, from the vegetable to the visceral--chickens with heads on, tripe, pigs' trotters, octopus--food in its wild, raw state that exhilaratingly defies supermarket sanitisation.

Santa Caterina's rebirth has been a slow, patient process. Plans for redevelopment were first mooted in 1997, as the market was languishing both commercially and civically. Though close to the city centre, it serves a relatively poor area, hemmed in by dense, dingy apartment blocks. Covered by a decaying pitched roof, the market's mess and stench had become a local eyesore and some thought it should be demolished, liberating a substantial parcel land for redevelopment.

Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue lived in the neighbourhood (Tagliabue and her family still do) and knew what a loss this would be to the area. Through long conversations with politicians, planners and the board that operates the city's markets, their competition-winning proposal of 1997 evolved into a larger and more painstaking piece of 'bottom up' urban regeneration that includes the design of new housing blocks and strengthening routes through the dense urban fabric.

The remodelled market is the most recent layer in a rich architectural geology that dates back to a Roman necropolis, unearthed during excavations for the new building. Its discovery conspired to delay and recast the project, as archaeologists pored over the remains and public bodies pondered what to do with them. EMBT's solution is a small archaeological museum set like a prow at the east corner of the market, together with a series of lights and viewing funnels punched into the public plaza beyond, so that shoppers can examine the subterranean relics. Political and funding stalemates mean that the viewing pits are covered at present, though the hope is that local bureaucracy can eventually be untangled to complete this final flourish.

The original nineteenth-century market was built on the remains of the eponymous medieval Dominican convent of Santa Caterina that burnt down in 1835. EMBT's scheme keeps the market's low arched walls on three sides, containing and defining the site. On the fourth south-east side, the orthogonal geometry is decisively fractured, as the new edge of the market dodges and weaves around a new public plaza and two new social housing blocks containing 59 low rent apartments for the elderly. Below ground, to minimise mess and disruption, is the business end of things. Lorries deliver fresh produce to a busy loading bay, from where it is ferried to the main market hall by a system of goods lifts and porters.

The lucky senior citizens (and those in the surrounding blocks) who overlook the building have possibly the best view of the revitalised Santa Caterina. Its roof is a fifth elevation that drapes and swells over the market hall like a zanily coloured blanket or camouflage net. Extending the Catalan tradition of hectic mosaic ornament, it is clad in hexagonal ceramic tiles that make up a pixellated abstract pattern of fruit and vegetables. With some 300 000 tiles in 67 colours, covering an area of 5500sqm, it was an intensive undertaking. Using computer simulations, models and practical tests, the difficulties of constructing such a vast surface were overcome by assembling single tiles into larger modules, so each colour-coded hexagonal 'pixel' is made up of 37 tesserae.

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The undulating roof structure is no less inventive, hung from huge arched trusses that span yirtually the width of the market hall. Between this main structure, the timber and tiled roof plane folds and curves like rippling fabric, supported by a secondary structure slung from the main arches. The perimeter zone is spanned by the original nineteenth-century roof trusses, establishing a fertile dialogue between old and new. Much of the project's appeal lies in this sense of creative reuse and of adding to the sum of a complex and fascinating history. Unlike the overwrought Scottish Parliament (AR November 2004), it is also simpler and more robust in conception and execution. The new timber, mainly cedar, has an artisanal warmth and roughness, and the slatted cladding at the plaza end resembles, appropriately, deconstructed loading pallets.

Despite the relentless march of homogenised supermarket food shopping, the market is still an essential part of Barcelona life. Markets are an important neighbourhood focus for both economic and social exchange and their presence helps to cultivate a strong sense of place and community. The Catalan word placa (or the Spanish plaza) means 'place' (an abbreviated form of market-place), cementing a powerful, historic link with urban life. Barcelona has over 80 markets of various kinds, from books to antiques, with neighbourhood food markets accounting for half that number. The most famous is La Boqueria, midway down the Ramblas, a veritable nineteenth-century iron and glass cathedral dedicated to food. Santa Caterina's origins are more modest, but its dramatic new market hall is no less cathedral-like, with lofty naves of sumptuous produce attracting the consumer faithful. Most encouragingly, its rebirth has proved that the notion of a food market, which thrives on the slow, patient dynamic of personal contact and service (this cut of meat, that crab, those aubergines) can be successfully reinvented for the hyperdriven, modern world.

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