Interesting piece from Barcelona, where a futuristic hotel complex is propose for a man-made island just off the coast.
With an initial investment of 1.5 billion euros (£1.27 billion), the hotel complex will also include a 24 hour shopping mall, a marina capable of mooring yachts up to 656 feet in length, and private apartments, some of which will be available on a "timeshare" system of 20,000 euros for an annual one-week occupancy right.
Usally, the city fathers love such big projects (this slow-motion one in Lexington comes to mind) and it's preservationists and anti-rich folks who raise the red flags, but not here,
"We have no need or desire to take on projects of this nature," Xavier Trias, the mayor from Catalonia's centre-right nationalist CiU party, said in an interview with the Catalan news channel 3/24, while admitting the City Hall will give the proposal due consideration.
"We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project (for the city) will follow a different path."
"We have no intention of turning Barcelona into a spectacle," he added.
Well, I recall y'all hosted the 1992 Olympics and one of the cultural touchstones of the coverage was the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, including the tower-happy Sagrada Família church that seemed to be the unofficial landmark of Barcelona like the Opera House is for Sydney.
The proposed project seems to have some architectural applied knowledge, a bit of creativity and some innovation, albeit aimed at very rotund felines (but, as Willie Sutton said, that's where the money is); Gaudi's work already has the city in the spectacle camp. That horse has already left the bard, X-man.
It could be that this project screams multinationalism and that runs counter to the anti-EU and anti-Madrid vibe that Catalan nationalists (think Quebec-Canada as a Catalonia-Spain analog with a bit less bile) looking down their noses at the project with a bit of anti-modernist vibe thrown in.
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