La Model Prison

Historic · Nova Esquerra de l'EixampleBarcelona,Spain

A Barcelona prison of six cell wings radiating from one hall so a single guard saw every corridor, now being turned into housing and schools.

La Model was built on the idea that being watched is the punishment. Six cell wings radiate from a single central hall, so that one officer standing in the middle could see down every corridor at once. It occupies an entire block of the nineteenth-century grid, which is why the streets around it end in a blank wall. It opened in 1904 and worked for a hundred and thirteen years, through a monarchy, a republic, a war, a dictatorship and a democracy. The last prisoners left in June 2017, and what happens to the block now is the result of thirty years of pressure from the streets around it. Neighbourhood associations argued that a full square of the city was being used to hold people while the district had nowhere to put a school, a park or affordable flats. The wings are being converted into public housing, a school, a nursery, a sports hall and a home for older people. A memorial stays inside them, because the last execution in Barcelona was carried out in this building.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check what is open before you go — the site is a memorial inside a long conversion project, and which parts can be entered and whether the visit is guided has changed from one season to the next.
A camera flattens this place — the galleries are long, dim and repetitive and they photograph as corridors, so what is worth carrying away is the sightline rather than the picture.
Allow more time than the size suggests — the cells are small and repetitive, and the visit works by accumulation rather than by any single room, so a quick circuit gets almost nothing from it.

Things to do

1
Turn a full circle at the watching point
Walk to the middle of the central hall and turn slowly through a full circle. Six corridors run away from you, each lined with cell doors on two or three levels, and you can see the far end of all of them without moving. Everything else in the building follows from that single sightline.
2
Shut a cell door behind you
The cells are small, high and lit by one window well above eye level, so you cannot see out of them. Stand inside one with the door pushed to for a minute. The proportions do the explaining: the room is designed so that the only view is upward and the only sound is the corridor.
3
Walk the outside of the block
Do a full circuit of the perimeter on the street. Four sides of blank wall in the middle of an ordinary residential grid, with flats and shops directly opposite. This is what the neighbourhood looked at for a century, and it explains the campaign more directly than anything inside does.