• Toyo Ito designs the hypothetical Hermitage museum in Barcelona
  • The Hermitage project is disentangled
  • The Hermitage: opportunity or speculation?

Unlike Amsterdam or Malaga, Barcelona will not host the Hermitage, the legendary art museum in St. Petersburg that treasures around three million pieces of art. After almost eight years of speculation, campaigns for and against and leaks of renders on the future building that was to house the museum (the last one, with the signing of the Pritzker Prize Toyo Ito), finally Barcelona has said "no" to the project to raise a franchise of the great Russian art gallery.

The City Council has presented this morning four reports from the perspectives of mobility, urban planning, culture and economic viability of the project to justify its decision. The most obvious is its location in the so-called New Bocana of the Port of Barcelona, ​​an area that was badly damaged by the Gloria storm last week. The buildings of the Hotel W and the headquarters of Desigual suffered serious damage that the deputy deputy mayor of Urban Planning, Mobility and Ecology of Barcelona, ​​Janet Sanz, estimated at 12 million euros.

"It is a fragile space on the coast of the city due to its proximity to the sea," said Sanz, who also affected the lack of connection between the area and the rest of the city: the nearest metro stop, the Barceloneta , is two kilometers away. The old fishing district already accumulates enough transportation and tourist saturation problems to add one more.

In a context of "sustainability" in which more than build, the priority should be to rehabilitate existing buildings, the proposal of the Japanese architect (a brand new building covered by sinuous white plates that simulated the waves of the sea) has not convinced the town hall. Sanz called the proposal of the renowned architect as "a mushroom" that would lack "meaning" and suggested other possible locations that the City Council would be willing to study, such as the World Trade Center area, the end of the Rambla de Prim (playing the 22 @) or the Three Chimneys. "The projects have to adapt to the city, not the city to the projects," he said.

The reports are also negative when assessing the economic viability and the cultural project of the museum. The deputy mayor of Culture, Joan Subirats, described the forecasts of visitors to the project presented as "excessively optimistic." The promoters numbered 850,000 visitors who would have the museum the first year, a number similar to that of the Picasso Museum and also counted that everyone would pay full admission, when it is usual that with discounts and museum vouchers, only 37% from the public of the Barcelona museums do it. The study projected 1.5 million visits within 13 years, betting that the museum would receive more visits than the Guggenheim, the Thyssen-Bornemisza or the Dalí de Figueres museums, the most visited in Catalonia only behind the Barça Museum . Some expectations that the City Council has found unrealistic.

The death in 2018 of Jorge Wagensberg , former director of CosmoCaixa, with a respected museum trajectory and designated to lead the project, has also subtracted points to the project viability.

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