market by enric miralles and benedetta talgiabue

Seven years in the making, the renovated Santa Caterina market in central Barcelona is a glorious thing.Here is a retail food market, utterly unlike a morgue-like British supermarket, glistening with fresh fish and seafood, bloody with skinned rabbits and poultry, gleaming with fruit and vegetables, set under a suitably theatrical roof.Appropriate, not just because the newly re-opened market is a the kind of vivid public space dreamed of by soulful city planners and big-spirited architects, but also because this is the city of Gaudi, the saintly patron of a much-admired urban culture that thrives on surrealism in architecture.The hundred or so market stalls housed in this three-level structure, close to the city's medieval cathedral, dedicated to Saint Eulalia, the Lusitanian martyr, are covered with a great, wave-like roof adorned with a magic carpet of 325,000 colourful ceramic tiles lifted on writhing, and intertwining, steel columns.This looks absolutely terrific from the windows and balconies of old and brand-new apartment blocks crowded together around the market square; it gives fresh life, if any was really needed, to the city's ingrained market culture, and is a way of showing the rest of us how we might learn to shop well for our supper in years to come, if only we could fight off the vigorous