Word: barcelona
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Costas must draw upon a year of memorizing Olympic facts and cramming history to meet his greatest professional challenge. As Olympics ringmaster, Costas has the best -- and hottest -- seat in the house. Characteristically, he deflects the pressure with a joke. The Barcelona assignment, he says, is just the "payoff for three years of saying, 'We'll be right back after these messages...
...Barcelona's glory really began in the ninth century, with Guifre el Pelos (literally, Wilfred the Hairy--his famed hairiness has since passed into legend) leading the way to independence against the invading Moors. As the first genuine national (read: Catalan) hero, he began a noble line of political--and hairy--agitators...
...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 this subject at length (he is an art critic, after...
...acting as a symbol, a building can resonate with much greater force in the cultural consciousness; it is like an empty vessel that has been filled with a culturally-endowed meaning. During the occupation of Barcelona by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, for example, the construction of the Ciutadella (the Citadel of Barcelona) became a hated symbol of Bourbon tyranny...
Throughout, Hughes adroitly analyzes the architectural syntax of the city by way of its ideological underpinnings. What we discover is that, more often than not, the Catalan drive for self-definition has been projected and voiced through the urban landscape of Barcelona itself...