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After twenty years of doubt, a new tower should see the light of day on Place Glòries, consequently modifying the Barcelona Skyline. By launching an international architectural competition on the subject, the town hall has one objective: to build a “singular” building a stone’s throw from the Torre Glòries.
Photo: Barcelona town hall
While Place Glòries has just been inaugurated, the facade restoration of the area does not yet seem completely finished. A new one – well almost – project, nicknamed Torre Ona or now Edifici Ona, has just been announced by the town hall, after two decades of hesitation.
Since 2005, this real estate project has changed its name, form, function. Then nothing. The project reappears from time to time, like an urban mirage, before falling into oblivion. But Jaume Collboni and especially Maria Buhigas, architect of the city, seem decided to make this mirage a reality: a competition to find the ideal architect will be organized by the end of the year.
The town hall of Barcelona no longer wants a tower exclusively from offices, as initially planned. The new Edifici Ona will also house housing, in a logic of claimed functional diversity. He will grow on the current field of the underground parking lot, facing the shopping center, in an area where buildings are starting to get out of the ground at a good pace. On the other side of the square, three new blocks of public housing already reach the eleven floors.
Compete the Glories tower
However, the vagueness persists on the exact height of the future building. We only know that he will not exceed the Torre Glòries and its 142 meters. A choice that repairs, in hollow, an old frustration: that of Jean Nouvel, the architect of the famous tower, who dreamed at the time of an even higher luminous geyser. The town hall, already chilly at the idea of verticality, had put a stop at its ambitions.
Read also: in Barcelona, the time has (finally) come to celebrate the new place Glòries
Today, the page seems to turn. The term “tower” was even erased from the official vocabulary, replaced by “building”. Less spectacular, more consensual, but the issues remain the same. Will Edifici Ona be the missing piece of Puzzle Glòries? Too early to say. But after twenty years of wandering, Barcelona seems ready to draw a line on her hesitations. Or, at least, to lay the first stone.
