White city.

A dazzling, monumental presence in the dense urban texture of Barcelona's Barri Gotic, Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art is a fluidly responsive synthesis of space, light and crisp planar geometries.

The origins of the urban framework for the Barcelona Museum for Contemporary Art lie in the urban design policy of Oriol Bohigas and his Catalan colleagues, which established a series of small-scale initiatives for the renewal of decayed city fabric (as opposed to a larger scale masterplan), following the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s.(1) Bohigas's policy included the establishment of new small-scale piazzas and the revision and rehabilitation of significant buildings such as churches and convents within the fabric of the former monastic cloister and the labyrinthine paseos and buildings of the Barri Gotic. The detailed urban planning proposals for the area, which includes the Casa de la Caritat(2) and the Casa de la Misericordia, were subsequently carried out by Lluis Clotet and his architect collaborators. These interventions, which included considerable demolition, suggested a design response that would create five linked public squares of different local character.

In 1987 the museum commission was awarded to Richard Meier in a flamboyant gesture by the Mayor of Barcelona Pasqual Maragall.(3) The typology is Meier's favourite - a contemporary art museum. At the same time, it presented him with the most complex and demanding urban fabric in which to place his inevitably startling and pristine project. The Barcelona museum is Meier's most monumental to date, within the European context. It is both assured and heroic, and has (especially of the magnificent internal ramp-hall) a towering and cavernous nature. Its tremendous extended length signals a departure; it is a wall building, the first of a new type in Meier's vocabulary of forms. But, it is also, essentially, a response to the requirements of reconstituting the urban site-plan.

Meier describes this response as follows: 'The museum creates a dialogue between the quarter's historic urban fabric and the contemporary art within. The labyrinthine nature of the site's existing paths and routes is reflected in the building's organisation, most notably in the main entry, which is paralleled by a pedestrian passageway between the museum's rear garden, and a newly created plaza in front of the museum.(4) This paseo will join a pedestrian network running throughout the old city. The gentle fold of this circulation path emphasises the centrifugal movement of the cylindrical lobby and describes a fifth facade, connecting the geometries of the museum to an urban context characterised by skewed intersections and the domes of ancient churches.'

From the early designs in 1987, it is the disposition of the rotunda which dominates Meier's sketches. At this point, two early drawings propose a reversal of the built version, in that the voided rotunda forms the transitional courtyard between the piazza and the northern garden, and the ramp-hall is set against the curved half-circle of the rotunda itself. In this way the ramp itself engages with the paseo transition. Further sketches elaborate the development of smaller urban squares to the north of the Casa de la Caritat, and an alternative roof-plan suggests an embedded rotunda with a shallow-curved ramp-hall facing the piazza. Yet more variations, in January and July 1988, fluctuate between variants of a huge circular trace, off-centre of the gridded plan, carrying an outboard ramp-hall and yet another with a skewed ramp-hall in the otherwise present position.(5)

The overall project finally comes to rest within the matrix of two nine-bay squares agitated to the left of the central axis by the rotunda and its reciprocal scallop-form paseo wall to the west. The whole ensemble is elevated onto a massive plinth and the structural diagram, in particular, reveals the supremacy of the planar geometries which both define the plan and the major systems of movement and space.

In studying the plan, there can be no doubt about its modernity and the lineage of such Corbusian projects as the Cite de Refuge, to which it may also refer, but there is another reading that arises - that of a reassessment of Schinkel and the Altes Museum in Berlin. If this is seen as a model, both the monumental columnar structure and the rotunda immediately yield much deeper resonances. Similarly, the parallel of the Schinkel loggia, with staircases addressing a public square, and Meier's ramp-hall is suggested, with the more private spaces of the galleries layered behind this great public vestibule - an atrium which in turn gives spectacular views of the new piazza from both the ramps and the access passerelles that feed the linear gallery spaces.

Meier has said that 'The whole formal basis of the Modern Movement, fostered a new kind of volumetric exploration, one that still seems to hold many possibilities. I am still taken with the poetics of Modernism'.(6) In this case the volumetric exploration and the spectacular presence of natural daylight extend Meier's own tradition, begun in the seminal Frankfurt Museum of 1985 (AR November 1985). And while the Frankfurt plan is secured by a singular planar gesture that stabilises the ramp, the route and the cubic galleries, the Barcelona project is even more wonderfully incised by the major planar gestures that, in turn, may signal a private homage to the planar legacy and poetry of Mies, which is so poignantly present in Barcelona in the reconstructed German pavilion.

Approaching the museum from the tight streets that lead in from Las Ramblas, to the east, the sudden exposure of the vast grid of granite pavement that covers the new Placa dels Angels, with its brilliant southern orientation, also comes as a shock. The equally vast white wall of the pristine museum and its array of forms, heightens this moment to a dramatic, dazzling spectacle. But, set against the splendid azure-blue of the Mediterranean skies, Richard Meier's predilection for the clarity and abstraction of a sublime whiteness can be nowhere more appropriate than in Barcelona.

The array of forms on the ramp-accessed plinth of the building's main southern frontage begins with the sculpture gallery. Next, the horizontally articulated and sun-shaded glass screen of the vast linear ramp-hall and atrium extends westwards and is terminated by a pure cylinder enclosing a spiral public-staircase. This element is oversailed by a final gesture marking the main entrance - an outrigged wall-plane which is both sliced and pierced with a balcony from a terrace above - the whole signalling a kind of villa theme which reduces the scale of the architecture at the public entrance, one metre above the plaza. This entry movement is in turn controlled by a further wall plane at 90 degrees to the main geometry, and leading into the circular lobby.

At this point of arrival, which is articulated with a beautiful, simple curvilinear counter in white marble, it is also possible to see out into the paseo and across into the western wing of the museum and vice versa. From the entrance lobby, the abrupt rotation of movement from the rotunda, through the preliminary atrium is again breathtaking - with the prospect of the great linear attenuation of the ramp-hall ahead. As you go up the ramps, an ever-widening panorama of the surrounding medieval city is revealed. The ramp-hall itself, and its plan depth, serves to filter the natural light and protect the northern run of gallery and exhibition space. The main circulation to the art galleries is in the form of a glass-lensed edge of the main structural floor, a threshold of light, that has to be crossed in order to access the art, in the north-facing, flexible exhibition halls. This powerful linear device and the presence of the great planar spine-wall (the decisive east-west ordering device of the plan), are both further articulated by stretched-edge top-lighting from linear roof-lights. The same device is used to highlight the upper third level of loft-like galleries, which also have full roof monitors in the eastern wing.

Thus, the inner movement is very clear. The gracious ascent of the ramps is complemented by the stretch of illuminated pathway, which in turn is articulated by the special exhibition in the rotunda and in the double-height free plan sculpture vessel.

The galleries have restricted views, mainly through slotted openings in the metal clad north facade, with full height doors at ground floor. All are fully controlled with simple, discreet, manual fabric sunshades. The overhead monitors at roof-level are also fully adjustable with louvres above inner lay-lights, and the artificial lighting and air-conditioning systems are generally extremely well addressed with minimum intrusion.

What is provided, quite simply, is a wide range of flexible gallery and exhibition spaces, with facilities to display very large pieces of artwork, if required. As the present collection, together with its archive and associated educational activities,(7) develop, the needs of a growing art centre should be comfortably accommodated. The present fit-out is in the form of deep section 'floating' screens, to accommodate the hanging, the character of the galleries is shown in the polished granite floors and the plain white stucco walls.(8) Service entrances and offices are all accommodated in the western end of the plan, as are the museum shop facing the piazza near the entrance, and the cafe which faces onto the northern garden.

The great flexibility and connected openness of the interior will demand careful management to retain the dignity of its strict order of finishes and detail, and to operate the environmental systems to maximum effect. But it is the splendid monumental scale of the columnar procession within the ramp-hall and its atrium, and the experience of this wonderful space from all levels, that must remain the inspired memory of each visit to this extraordinary addition to Barcelona.

1 For an account of the urban design initiative for the notorious El Raval district of the old town and the evolutionary form of urban site plan see 'Minimal Architecture in Barcelona', Ignasi de Sola Morales, Lotus International. See also 'The Prodigious Decade', Ignasi de Sola Morales, in Building in a New Spain, pp91-99, Art Institute of Chicago and GG, 1992, for further background to the emergent condition surrounding Spanish architecture from 1975 onward.

2 The Casa de la Caritat was converted into the Centre for Modern Art by Albert Viaplana and Hello Pinon. The reduced form of the original structure retains a square courtyard with the contemporary intervention by Viaplana and Pinon within it. This building is punctured by archways which provide an east-west route. It effectively forms the northern boundary to Meier's site.

3 See Richard Meier Architect vol. 2 Rizzoli 1992, p279, for Meier's account of the award of the commission.

4 The Placa dais Angels is named after the Convent dels Angels, south of the site, which was converted by Lluis Clotet and Ignacio Paricio into a function centre.

5 For the progression of Richard Meier's conceptual sketches see Richard Meier - Frank Stella Arte e Architettura, Electa 1993, pp122, 124, 125 & 128.

6 AR 1154 April 1993, p29.

7 The MAC-BA has fully established departments, including an educational programme.

8 Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Spain 1987-1995, notes by Richard Meier explain that 'Traditionally resonant materials, such as granite paving and stucco, describe the public signposts of the plaza, sculpture garden and sculpture gallery, while gently reflective materials such as glass, wood flooring and aluminium panels are used to encapsulate areas characterised by motion and light.'