Embracing Life 生命之恩

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Another striking new building is the Palacio de la Musica y Congresos Euskalduna.


Designed to resemble a ship.


It has a number of auditoriums.


One seating 2200 people and is the home of the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra.

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Puente Euskalduna

A link between Deustu and Pl Sagrado Corazon


The curveliner form that make it unusual with flyover.


Pedestrian walkway at one side of the flyover.

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The new underground metro system, designed in futuritic style by Norman Foster.

Entrance and exit to the metro system.



Local people of Bilbao



Landscape furniture on the street.

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Introducing Barcelona
Barcelona, one of the Mediterranean's busiest ports, is more than the capital of Catalonia. In culture, commerce and sport it not only rivals Madrid, but also considers itself on a par with the greatest European cities. The success of the 1992 Olympic Games, staged in the Parc de Montjuic, confirmed this to the world. Although there are many historical monuments in the Old Town, the city is best known for the scores of buildings in the Eixample left by the artistic explosion of Modernisme in the decades around 1900. Today, Barcelona still sizzles with creativity; its bars and public parks speak more of bold contemporary design than of tradition.


Barcelona Cathedral
This compact Gothic cathedral, with a Romanesque chapel and beautiful cloister, was begun in 1298 under Jaime II, on the foundations of a site dating back to Visigothic times.

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The cathedral was not finished until the late 19th century, when the main facade was completed.

The facade and spire are 19th century additions to the original Gothic building.



The Catalan style Gothic interior has a single wide nave with 28 side chapels.



These are set between the columns supporting the vaulted ceiling, which rises to 26m.



In the crypt, beneath the main altar, is the alabaster sarcophagus (1339) of St Eulalia, martyred for her beliefs by the Romans during the 4th century AD.

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Santa Cateriana market by Enric Miralles
Like their Scottish Parliament building, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue's Barcelona market took a very long time to construct. But it is another outstanding piece of architecture.


This food market is located few street down from the cathedral. Seven years in the making, the renovated Santa Caterina market in central Barcelona is a glorious thing. Here is a retail food market, utterly unlike a morgue-like British supermarket, glistening with fresh fish and seafood, bloody with skinned rabbits and poultry, gleaming with fruit and vegetables, set under a suitably theatrical roof. Appropriate, not just because the newly re-opened market is a the kind of vivid public space dreamed of by soulful city planners and big-spirited architects, but also because this is the city of Gaudi, the saintly patron of a much-admired urban culture that thrives on surrealism in architecture.





The market are covered with a great, wave-like roof adorned with a magic carpet of 325,000 colourful ceramic tiles lifted on writhing, and intertwining, steel columns.




The small and lively market is also home to a food market selling cheese, honey and sweets.

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A bar right next to fish stall and a restaurant is at the right of the entrance.


A skylight that bring in light to the interior.


A small courtyard between the back of market and apartment. This looks absolutely terrific from the windows and balconies of old and brand-new apartment blocks crowded together around the market square; it gives fresh life, if any was really needed, to the city's ingrained market culture, and is a way of showing the rest of us how we might learn to shop well for our supper in years to come, if only we could fight off the vigorous supermarket virus infecting cities worldwide.




The design commission went, in 1997, to the highly imaginative Catalan practice EMBT, the husband and wife team of Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue famous, and infamous in certain Caledonian circles, for Edinburgh's quixotic and forest-like Scottish Parliament building, which, promiscuously expensive, took a prodigiously long time to build. It is, though, a strangely great building, in the way that most of Gaudi's are strangely great. Sadly, Enric Miralles himself died, in 2000, long before the Scottish Parliament was finished and, perhaps even more sadly, he will be unable to wander through the all-so-alive alleys of Santa Caterina market.

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BARCELONA PAVILION
Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich were jointly responsible for the design of the German section of the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona. In addition to being open to the general public, this pavilion would accommodate the inaugural ceremonies of the exposition's German section (attended by King and Queen of Spain) and be used for numerous government receptions. It was an important building in the history of modern architecture, known for its simple form and extravagant materials, such as marble and travertine. Several critics and historians have declared it "the most beautiful building of the century".


The site selected was crossed by one of the exposition's walking routes. By allowing this path to continue uninterrupted through the spaces of his building, Mies van der Rohe underlined the open character of those spaces and eased the transition between the exterior and interior.



The pavilion consisted of two horizontal planes: the smaller- forming the roof, being held above the larger- forming a raised terrace, by cruciform shaped steel columns. Freely placed between these two planes were non-load-bearing walls of marble and glass; some extending beyond the roof plane to enclose and articulate exterior spaces.



The richness of the materials used in the pavilion: the marble and onyx walls, the travertine-faced podium, the tinted glass and the chromium-plated column covers with the attendant transparency quently blinded critics to the significant architectural values of this work.



At Barcelona mies van der Rohe brought his ideas on structure and space to a remarkable synthesis. From horizontal and vertical planes, opaque and transparent materials and skeletal construction, he created a building of great poetic feeling, whose position in terms of architectural development is undeniably that of a seminal work.

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A contemporary newspaper account pointed out that'...while the average visitor will find the building difficult to understand, for those who are artistically sensitive to the modern feeling, it becomes a rewarding adventure.



The absolute material austerity of the enclosed space is impregnated with a harmony of colours and forms. Vieing Kolbe's sculpture, which stands in the court pool, through the green tinted glass wall produces a feeling of noble calm and sublime tranquillity.



The possibility of establishing a complementary relationship between sculpture and architecture is a recurrent concern with architect. However, sculpture would seem to attain a significant architectural value only when acting directly on the milieu.


Thus Mies van der Rohe, at Barcelona, used the Kolbe figure as a necessary and integral part of his pavilion's space movement character.


So perfectly was this sculpture in sympathy with the pavilion's scale and spatial flow, and its location so important as a point of reference, that it comes as somewhat of a surprise to learn that it was an existing work, and not one commissioned especially for the pavilion.

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Collserola Telecommunications Tower- Barcelona, Spain
By Norman Foster
Another example of an infrastructure project that immerses itself into and enhances the landscape, despite its cutting-edge industrial construction, high-tech function, gigantic size, and rigorous geometric character, is the Collserola Telecomminications Tower in the Collserola hills of Barcelona, Spain.



Following an analysis of precedents, including bridges and shipbuilding techniques, a new structural concept emerged: a hybrid concrete and steel-braced tube, with a base diameter of only 4.5m, which dramatically minimises the tower's impact on the mountainside.



The competition brief posed the problem as a balancing act between operational requirements and the desire for a monumental technological symbol.


The solution reinvents the telecommunications tower from first principles.


A new symbol- that would provide the city with a fitting contemporary symbol.