In his talk “Disagreements: Two Drawings of the Same Square by Puig i Cadafalch”, Guillem Carabí compared two visions of the same subject, Barcelona’s main city square, Plaça de Catalunya. The first vision was photographer Lucien Roisin’s view of the square from a panoramic perspective, in keeping with his documentary approach, while the second approach comes from the perspective drawings of Puig i Cadafalch’s, which were adapted based on his approach to the city’s urban development.

As explained by Carabí, Roisin took a series of panoramic photos of Plaça de Catalunya in the early 20th century. The photos afford an opportunity to appreciate the architectural and environmental evolution of what was arguably the greatest point of tension between the old city and the Cerdà plan: a square that did not form part of Cerdà’s widening plan and that emerged from the geometric confusion at the point where Cerdà’s uniform city blocks met with the irregularities of Barcelona’s previously walled-in city centre.

However, in 1927, Puig i Cadafalch presented an urban development study of Plaça de Catalunya in which he made no attempt to hide his opposition to the tenets of the Cerdà Plan. By that time, the widening project was well under way, but it had not satisfactorily reconciled the meeting point between the new city and the old. Puig i Cadafalch’s study included two perspective drawings, as well as floor plans and cross sections that show how traffic and services were organized.

The goal of “Culture and the City” was to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on some of the big questions that shape the modern collective urban imagination. The conference was open to topics from any of the diverse fields that study the different ways in which the modern city is represented, narrated, measured and imagined. It also placed special focus on the way that certain historic cities have managed to defy globalization and retain their own unique identity by periodically holding major cultural events.