Eixample color plan

The Barcelona Color Plan was the first major Color Plan we carried out. Before that, we had already tested the methodology on listed streets, small towns, and through projects abroad.The Barcelona Color Plan was commissioned by the City Council through the Urban Planning Department and the “Urban Landscape Campaign,” taking advantage of the sponsorship opportunities attracted to the city by the 1992 Olympic Games.

To address an area of 10,000 hectares, the work was divided into historical districts (Eixample, Ciutat Vella, Horta, Sant Andreu, etc.). A multidisciplinary team was assembled, including the historian Joan Ainaud de Lasarte and a group of professionals from the Heritage Restoration Workshop School at the Horta Labyrinth, where Joan Casadevall served as deputy director.During the first year, all façades in the Eixample district were surveyed. Every available archive was reviewed, and paint stratigraphy tests were carried out on more than one thousand buildings. The result was a database and a catalogue of colours classified chronologically, by historical periods and architectural elements (wall surfaces, reliefs, woodwork, and ironwork).

All this work was disseminated through an exhibition, the book The Colours of the Eixample, and the Barcelona Colour Chart.Between 2000 and 2004, commissioned by the District Council and in collaboration with the Heritage Department, we designed and coordinated the European-funded “Raphael” programme: Restoration Techniques without Paint Overlays. This programme served to test laser cleaning, ion-exchange and micro- projection methods in various European cities, these techniques were applied to more than one hundred Modernist façades in the Eixample district.