BARCELONA - Residents of Barcelona have given the thumbs-down to a proposed new design museum in the heart of the city, complaining that it has the aesthetic allure of an office stapler.
Neighbourhood associations around the Catalan capital's central Plaza de las Glories have condemned the design "forits position, its exaggerated height, its aggressive and intimidating form, and because it's badly designed".
They particularly object to the overhanging upper section of what they call La Grapadora (the Stapler).
"We cannot accept that an edifice equivalent to a nine or 10-storey skyscraper be plonked in the central space of the square," they say in a document submitted to the city hall.
The planned mega-museum is to house not only the furniture, lamps and utensils of Barcelona's rich design heritage but also the contents of the city's former textile museum, which was controversially closed two years ago.
Perpetrator of these alleged architectural crimes is none other than the MBM practice of Oriol Bohigas, grand master of Barcelona's transformation from the dingy, miserable backwater of the Franco years to the cool urban centre it became in the 1980s and 1990s.
During Franco's dictatorship, Barcelona's residents' associations were among the few political spaces where democracy could sprout. Here future leaders such as Pascual Maragall, hand-in-hand with sympathetic architects including Bohigas, developed - then enacted - their revolutionary urban blueprint during Maragall's subsequent 26 years as mayor.
The architects defend their ¬88 million ($198 million) project, set to open in 2011. "It's compact, with few entrances ... of a material that is brilliant without being blinding," Bohigas said.
But Barcelona's residents remain unimpressed. "Bohigas is a good architect but they should have announced an international competition," wrote one blogger. "This looks like a multi-storey car park."
