Garden Block: Fusing Nine Cerdà Blocks into One Layered Hyper-block for Barcelona in 2050

Most visions of a denser Barcelona start by deciding what to demolish. Garden Block starts by deciding what to keep. The proposal takes Ildefons Cerdà's Eixample grid as heritage rather than a constraint, then fuses nine historical blocks into a single interconnected unit, the Hyper-block. Housing, public programmes, gardens, workplaces, services, circulation and tourism stack and overlap across multiple levels. The city grows by reorganising the relationship between ground, building and landscape, not by planting towers on a cleared site.

Designed by Дмитрий Цатуров, настя шкарупа, Irina Tormysheva and Vlad Vorontsov, Garden Block earned the People's Choice Award in the Hyperblock competition. The brief asked how Barcelona might look in 2050 if it could absorb more people without giving up its identity, its public space or its greenery. The team's answer treats the city as a continuously evolving organism, with the past serving as the foundation for whatever comes next.

Yellow Bridges Over a Courtyard That Belongs to Everyone

The opening view captures the project's central move at eye level. A lawn courtyard with a reflecting pool sits at the heart of the composition, and slender yellow walkways leap between towers overhead. In the old Eixample, the street was the boundary between blocks. Here those in-between spaces become a shared network of public, green and infrastructural ground, and the courtyard reads less as a private interior and more as a neighbourhood commons where someone walks a dog in the open.

Those elevated links also echo one of the project's most distinctive references: the Castells, Catalonia's tradition of human towers built through collective effort. The metaphor fits. Garden Block imagines density as something assembled and mutually supported, with each level depending on the ones around it, rather than as a single heroic object. The yellow bridges make that interdependence legible, tying separate volumes into one cooperative structure.

A Gridded Terrace That Lets New Architecture Stay Quiet

The second rendering moves onto a paved terrace laid out on a grid, with a yellow-edged planted pool and ferns softening the hard surface as pedestrians head toward mid-rise apartment blocks. The paving pattern quietly restates the logic of the Cerdà plan at the scale of a footstep, so the grid persists even where the streets themselves have been absorbed into the larger module.

Restraint is deliberate here. The team describes new structures as lighter and visually understated, contemporary without competing aggressively with the historic fabric. Existing structures and façades can remain part of the composition while new construction arrives selectively. The project does not imitate old Barcelona; it extends the underlying rules of proportion and order, which is a more convincing form of respect than pastiche.

From Block to District: The Grid Enlarged, Not Erased

The aerials reveal the strategy at its true scale. Yellow-outlined courtyard blocks and round towers line up beside a long, tree-filled park strip, while a second view stretches into a linear district of green roofs, pink-edged slabs and circular buildings strung along a yellow line, with a wooded park dissolving into haze beyond. The original block remains the basic unit; the Hyper-block is simply the grid operating at a larger scale.

What makes this persuasive is the argument for flexibility. Garden Block insists that future blocks should not be locked into one permanent use but should adapt to demographic shifts, environmental demands, economic pressure and changing resident needs. The extra territory created between and above existing blocks is allocated to public functions, so added density brings added commons with it. The colour coding in these views reads almost like a diagram of that layered allocation, mapping where new public ground threads through the old pattern.

Why This Project Matters

Garden Block refuses the false choice that haunts so much urban speculation: preserve the historic city and freeze it, or transform it and lose its memory. By enlarging the operating scale of the Cerdà grid instead of replacing it, the proposal shows that preservation and change can happen at the same time, provided new work respects the spatial logic, proportions and cultural identity already in place.

Its People's Choice recognition suggests the idea resonates beyond the jury room. The project offers a model for any gridded city facing pressure to densify: treat the existing block as a module, open the gaps between blocks to collective use, and let programme shift over time. Barcelona's past, in this reading, is not something to overcome. It is the scaffolding for its 2050.

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Project credits: Garden Block Hyperblock (uni.xyz).