Barcelona, drawn from its own streets.

Barcelona on paper

The Eixample is the reason this print works. It was planned in the nineteenth century as a grid of identical square blocks with chamfered corners, and the map holds every one of them — so the middle of the sheet is a field of regular octagonal gaps where the streets meet, repeating for kilometre after kilometre. Nothing else prints like it. Cutting across the grid at its own angle is the Diagonal, a single straight avenue that ignores the pattern completely and is all the more obvious for it.

Below the grid the old city does the opposite. Ciutat Vella keeps its medieval lanes, so tight that at a wide frame they read as dark texture rather than as streets, and the contrast along the line where the two patterns meet is the strongest edge in the composition. The Rambla runs down through it to the water, and the port opens at the bottom of the sheet with the marina basins and the beaches running north-east.

The hills close the other sides. Montjuïc sits west as a large block of parkland with switchback roads and almost no grid, and Gràcia — a village swallowed by the city — keeps its own smaller, skewed street pattern where the Eixample runs out. Eight kilometres across holds the grid, the old city, the port and both hills. Take it in to two and the chamfered corners become the subject.