The colours of food: final layer in the Palimpsest of Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona

The colours and shapes of food in the decoration of a building were common in traditional architecture, particularly in the Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia in the nineteenth century. During the modernist period, we can distinguish both an abstract and a mimetic tendency in these colour transfers. Coloured glazed tiles were often used to cover modernist public buildings in the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The roof of Santa Caterina market in Barcelona follows this abstract modernist tradition and starts from the picture of a food stall as an inspiration. In the same way as some other contemporary architects, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue used a computer-aided process of pixilation to design a shiny coloured composition that reminds us of traditional colour transfer techniques from nature and traditional building materials. The result is a market conceived as a palimpsest in which various historical layers from the past can be read. Moreover, it represents in a virtual manner the chromatic experiences that take place in the spaces inside. The building features a type of transparency that is consistent with contemporary perception and which blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. Food has been a prominent inspiration throughout history for many artistic disciplines and was used as an argument to experiment with colour. The presence of food as a decorative element in architecture goes beyond a simple functional relationship with the use of rooms, and becomes a useful motive for organising a chromatic composition. Examples include coloured cornucopias of classical architecture, biblical food goods in the frescoes of medieval architecture (grapes, bread, fish, etc.), still life paintings in bourgeois housing, or the glazed ceramics used in modernist market buildings.Postprint (published version