Quotes on Ildefonso Cerdá

Two quotes from the book European Architecture 1750-1890 by Barry Bergdoll:

By the time Barcelona’s walls were razed in 1858, not only had the Mediterranean port achieved the greatest population density of any European city, but the urban crisis had inspired Ildefonso Cerdá (1815-76), a trained architect and engineer, to devote his life and personal fortune to formulating a general theory of “urbanization”, which he declared a new science. [For] Cerdá the plan, with its superimposition of a great diagonal cross-axis establishing a regional scale for a repeatable pattern of city blocks with distinctive chamfered corners, embodied his notion that it was possible to channel the forces of nineteenth-century speculative development towards a higher communitarian ideal, one indeed formed in conscious critique of the Hausmannian model [used in redeveloping Paris].

And:

Increasing ten-fold the land area of Barcelona with a planned extension of gridded blocks, Ildefonso Cerdá coined the term “urbanism” and authored the two-volume General Theory of Urbanization (1867), the first book to offer a body of theory, rather than simply a checklist of tasks, for designing cities. Cerdá’s book had little influence outside his native Spain, however; the theory of nineteenth-century building was encoded more in the language of contracts, bonds, and financial instruments that were the machines of the century’s credit revolution.