Arredo Urbano is an Italian periodical publication that, since 1961 and quarterly, presents interventions in the urban public space especially remarkable, in this issue appears an extensive article on the intervention project in the Plaça de la Font Màgica de Montjuïc written in 1989 by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Lluís Dilmé and Xavier Fabré. The project highlights the spaces designed by Puig i Cadafalch in 1917 and which, in 1929, hosted the Barcelona International Exhibition, the origin of the current Fira de Barcelona, the project’s promoter.
This rehabilitation of the open, free and public space, the great entrance walk to the mountain park, confronted the two Pavilions of Josep Goday and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the limits of a hall transversal to the axis. The main one harmonized the succession of ascending levels with a large central courtyard that gave access to the large underground exhibition space and recovered in a new location the four monumental columns of Puig i Cadafalch that the dictator Primo de Ribera had demolished in 1923. The project was the solution to the lack of fair space with an underground extension of more than twenty-three thousand square meters that connected the two existing palaces and enjoyed the large depressed central courtyard of access as an external reference and generator of natural light. Unfortunately, the project was not carried out, but it is curious that the deep meaning and, to a certain extent, the shape of that central courtyard is present in the access of the Caixaforum to the old Casarramona factory and that the unavoidable restitution of the columns of Puig i Cadafalch were finally made in the place we proposed.