In 1860, the masterplan for the City of Barcelona, designed by engineer Ildefons Cerdà, was rolled out. It placed the centre of the city in Plaça de les Glòries. In 2013 I spoke to architect Elías Torres, who explained his own Project for this square, which has never managed to take its place as a vital mid-point of the city. He drew Barcelona on a napkin in a tapas bar, reducing it to essential lines, ignoring the sea and redefining the parameters to perfect it as a geometric model. I later used a redesign of this drawing for the t-shirts of the Ex-Designer Project Bar. But there’s a twist: in the new design, the centre of the city is not Plaça de les Glòries but the location of the bar itself. Eventually, the idea of the urban ideogram came to define my “CityDiaries” collection for Palomar, where eleven cities have been reduced to their representative and identifying lines. The collection features Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Sydney and Tokyo.

Go to Palomarweb CityDiaries


Barcelona CityDiary
Photo Inga Knölke 2021