This guide (Barcelona 1979-2012. Contemporary Architecture City Guide)begins, intentionally, with the year that the first municipal elections were held (after the Franco dictatorship time). It thus spans the period of democratic government in the city from 1979 to the present day. Many transformations have occurred during this time, in particular in the urban and social realms.

The most important aspect of the Joan Miró Foundation’s collections is without doubt its valuable stock of works consisting in over 14,000 items. Most of this collection was donated to the Foundation by Joan Miró himself. Other pieces have come from the collections owned by Pilar Juncosa,the artist’s wife,and Joan Prats,his close friend and the driving force behind the idea of setting up the Foundation.

The fact that the city of Barcelona is a benchmark in the international sphere of contemporary architecture is amply demostrated by this book, wich looks at the most notable buildings of the last ten years.

The new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation was introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, to the sculptures designed for public spaces, and for the best selling volume dedicated to Contemporary Architecture 1979-2010.

This new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation was introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, to the sculptures designed for public spaces, and for the best selling volume dedicated to Contemporary Architecture.

Over the two past decades the city of Barcelona has become a point of reference for cultural tourism. The intense activity in the spheres of art and of town planning, and particularly the opening of new art centres and the modernisation of existing museums, alongside the growth of the city’s sculptural heritage have proven to be decisive factors.

Modernisme and Noucentisme were not antithetical. One came after the other. In fact, Modernisme differs from Jugendstil and Art Deco essentially by virtue of the place where it developed: Barcelona. The city would not have been possible without the noucentistes unifying idea, a notion that was unknown to the modernistes before them. The Noucentista ideology was capable of embracing in its overall cultural and political project the multifaceted and fragmentary whole of Modernisme.

The approximately five hundred sculptures within the reach of passers-by lie on the border between art and stage settings, culture and city. Although the main twentieth-century movements and artists are represented in different works, Barcelona has not been conceived as an open-air sculpture museum, despite resembling one. Instead, it has endeavoured to receive art in a vivacious project that allows us to define it as a plastic city.