Torre Glòries and its Mirador

Landmark · El Poblenou / Glòries (Sant Martí)Barcelona,Spain

A 144-metre Barcelona tower of coloured aluminium behind tilted glass, standing at the junction Cerdà drew as a centre the city never adopted.

Torre Glòries is a hundred and forty-four metres of concrete shell with more than four thousand five hundred windows cut through it, wrapped in aluminium panels in forty colours behind a second skin of tilted glass. The surface shifts from red at the base to blue at the crown as the light moves across it. Jean Nouvel finished it in 2005 and said he had been drawing a geyser and the rounded peaks of Montserrat. Barcelona said other things, and the nicknames arrived first. It stands where Barcelona was supposed to have its centre. Ildefons Cerdà drew the grid in 1859 with three of its greatest avenues meeting here, and expected the city to gather at the junction. It never did, and for a century and a half this was a road interchange. The office floors are closed, but a viewing level near the top is open, and that is the reason to come. From there the Eixample lies directly below as a diagram, block after chamfered block, running to the sea one way and the hills the other.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Sunset slots are the ones that sell out — the grid reads best in low sun, when every chamfered corner throws a shadow, and those times are taken days ahead in the warm months.
The tower is a night object — By day the panels are muted and read as ordinary cladding; after dark the lit skin does what the photographs show, seen from the street.
There is nothing else to enter — the rest of the building is offices, so a visit is the viewing level or nothing, and the ground floor offers no reason to stop.

Things to do

1
Read the grid from directly above
At the viewing level, find the edge that looks over the Eixample and stay there. Every block has its corners cut off at forty-five degrees, so the streets open into small octagons at each crossing. From above that pattern repeats to the horizon and the whole nineteenth-century idea is visible in a single glance.
2
Trace the grid until it breaks
From the same window, trace the regular blocks until they break. In one direction they run into the tangle of the old town, in another into the older village streets absorbed by the city, and behind you into the hills. The plan's edges are the most interesting part of it and you can only see them from height.
3
Watch the colours move round the lit skin from the square
The lit skin is a ground-level experience, not a view from inside. Stand across the square after dark and watch the colours work across the surface. The panels do not flash; the change is slow and it moves round the tower, which is why photographs of it never quite look like the thing itself.