Word: hugheses
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It is from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the...
Hughes races through the first 18 centuries or so like an inspired Aureliano Babilonia (the famous character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who deciphers the Buendia family history and tragic end). He takes us through the long and often bloody history of class struggle, cataloguing the numerous rebellions and...
In fact, Hughes speculates that since of Wilfred, the presence of healthy, bouyant hair has become a signifier of prowess: "The immense bigotis (mustaches) and patillas (muttonchop whiskers) sported by Barcelonese industrialists 1000 years later may, in their walruslike magnificence, have seemed to some of their owners to claim the...
The book admiringly traces the evolution of these irrepressible democratic impulses, but they become less important when set beside the city's magnificently mixed-up architecture, an aggregate of different periods and styles. Architecture is the second of Barcelona's most enduring features after democracy, and fittingly enough, Hughes treats...
Hughes's starting point is simple: architecture is a form of political expression invariable available only to those in power. It provides a kind of ready-made syntax that allows a political institution to represent its power through the planning of a city, or the construction of a building.