The history of Gehry’s fish (to add an epithet) begins, like many other things in the city, with a great event. It could have been the 1888 or the 1929 exposition. But no, it was the Olympics. The still remembered Olympics that served to change (or, at least, to make up) the face of Barcelona.
They were (because the years always run) the years before 1992, when the City Council wanted to make the city beautiful, give it another color. And even another use, new uses, which could be entitled Martín Gaite. The uses of the port were going to change radically. The coast was not for bathers, not for fishermen. The coast (the Olympic Village!) for sailing competitions.
That was what the city was going through, we say, when the Hotel Arts and the Mapfre Tower were built and when, at the foot of both, one of the symbols of post-Olympic Barcelona was erected.
Barcelona’s biggest fish is not in the sea
The goldfish, as you might know it, is a work of Frank Gehry. Frank Gehry, a Canadian, is one of the world’s most reputable architects. And his presence (his mere presence) evidences a quality of Barcelona: that it is a city of architects. Gaudí, Jujol(the mystery of Jujol, the architect in Gaudí’s shadow), Xavier Corberó(Do you know this impossible, intimate and hidden construction?), Ricardo Bofill(the five best works of Ricardo Bofill), Frank Gehry, of course.
Frank Gehry, perhaps best known and recognized for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, was the one who came up with the goldfish or his namesake fish. The fish, which floats on the Mediterranean and is perched on the sea itself, is 56 meters long and 35 meters high.
And one of the curiosities or the great characteristics that best define it is the absence of tail and head. There is no shortage of renegades of Ockham’s razor: those who argue that the fish was commissioned by the Masons of the city.
Built with bronze-colored steel, Gehry’s fish, when the sun shines directly on it, turns golden. Like a jewel. As an icon of the city already consolidated in identity reference.
