The city of Barcelona collects more than 100 art, design and architectural attractions, including museums, foundations, and cultural spots in general. Polpettas Mag selected some of them for you, come with us to discover some of the most beautiful places of the Catalan capital.

The Museu Blau

Studio Herzog & de Meuron

The Museu Blau de les Ciències Naturals (also known as The Forum Building) opened its doors in 2011, and it was built following a design competition -on the occasion of the Universal Forum of Cultures in 2004- won in 2000 by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. This project was the beginning of the redevelopment of an urban area situated between the end of Avenida Diagonal and the sea, an industrial and half-abandoned area.

This is one of the stunning projects signed by Herzog & de Meuron, who have a long list of museum projects, including the Tate Modern in London -and its recently opened new extension-, the Caixa Forum in Madrid, the Serpentine Gallery Pavillon in London, and the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar (France).

The triangular-shaped building houses since 2011 the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona.

The Picasso Museum

In this museum are collected all the early works of the Spanish artist, that proved his exceptional talent with just 9 years old!

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona also houses the series Las Meninas, a suite of 58 canvases and studies painted in 1957, and donated to the museum by Picasso himself in 1968. Pablo Picasso‘s unique, obsessive and personal reinterpretation of the famous painting by Diego Velázquez is an amazing study of the psychological aspects of the Infanta Margarita.

The Picasso Museum laid in carrer de Montcada, and occupies five contiguous buildings belonged to one of the richiest family of Barcelona between 13th and 15th century.

Gaudí in Barcelona

Casa Milà [aka La Pedrera] is one of Antoni Gaudí‘s best known landmarks in Barcelona, but maybe not everybody knows that the first municipal commission gave to Gaudí in the late 1870s is the design of the street lamps in Plaça Palau. Gaudí was convinced of the importance for people to spend time in the street, above all in Mediterranean cities.

The German Pavilion

Mies van der Rohe

This building is famous and worldly renowned as modern because of its rigor, its geometry, its precision and its clarity: German Pavilion in Barcelona was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) as the national “flag” of Germany for the 1929 International Exhibition held in Montjuic [Barcelona].

Built with glass, steel and different marble types, after the end of the Exhibition in 1930 the Pavilion was dismantled. But it soon became a reference point both in Mies van der Rohe’s career, and for the whole architecture scene of the XX century, so that in 1980 the City of Barcelona started to think about its possible reconstruction. The work started in 1983 and the new -nowadays- building opened in 1986 in the same original location.

In the reconstruction were used the same materials of the original building: glass, steel and four different types of stone (Roman travertine, green Alpine marble, ancient green marble from Greece and golden onyx Atlas) . They all have the same characteristics and origin that initially used in 1929.

So, it’s not the same, but it’s the same!

The famous Barcelona Chair, a true icon of modern design , was designed by Mies van der Rohe especially for this place in 1929 ca.