Traveling In Style : THE BEST OUTDOOR SHOW IN EUROPE : Barcelona’s Olympian Commitment to Great Public Art and High-Design Public Spaces Has Turned the City Into a One-of-a-Kind Visual Feast for Visitors : Barcelona

If you stand amid the exclamation-point spruce trees on the triangular-shaped landing and look northwest across the broad rust-green pool, past the statue of Neptune that perches on a stone-cube pedestal just offshore, this could be almost any urban park in Europe: A flat grassy promontory, jutting out from the opposite shore, leads back into fields of lawn through which paved footpaths snake. Neatly trimmed sycamores shade a patch of sandy dirt furnished with a dozen or so back-to-back pairs of benches. Nearby, children kick a rubber ball around and clamber over bright high-tech plastic playground gear. An old man feeds ducks and pigeons by the water’s edge.

If you turn to your left, though, back toward the park entrance, the place changes character instantly and dramatically. An immense, fantastical rust-brown construction--a jagged abstract dragon with a stairway through his middle and a slide down his tail--looms behind a round pond pierced by a waterspout and framed in terraced cascades. A wall of cold, stadium-style concrete benches rings the near bank of the pool. Above the wall rise nine thick, eerie, 70-foot-high columns, each encircled halfway up by a cage-like landing and perforated with square mirador windows. Atop the columns is a pillar crowned with a cluster of floodlights and a skullcap dome; the floodlights shine even in daylight, mixing their cold light with the warm light of the sun, and the towers suggest guard towers in some “Star Wars” prison, which might at any moment start moving toward you, menacing and unstoppable.

This isn’t just any old European urban park after all. It’s the Parc de l’Espanya Industrial in Barcelona, second city of Spain and capital of Catalonia. Designed by Basque architect Luis Pena Ganchegui and his Catalan colleague Francesc Rius to occupy the site of an old industrial complex near the busy Sants railway station, the park is both soft and hard, hospitable and discomfiting. Filled with serious art--not just the stylized dragon, which is Basque artist Andres Nagel’s “Baths of the Dragon of St. George,” but also a complex Cor-Ten steel piece by noted English sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and several other works by Spanish sculptors both classical and contemporary--the park has also been excoriated on aesthetic grounds by local and foreign observers alike.

Whatever its virtues, the Parc de l’Espanya Industrial is not an easy park to deal with. But neither is it an oddity in Barcelona nor an anomaly in an otherwise conservative environment. It’s one of nearly 200 new or newly refashioned parks, squares and other public spaces in the city--hardly any of them conventional, some of them positively avant-garde and at least half of them graced with uncompromising art pieces and/or architectural elements that alternately delight and infuriate the public.

Barcelona--a bustling Mediterranean port city now bustling more than ever as it prepares to host the 1992 Summer Olympics--has always been a visually exciting place. This is the city of Antoni Gaudi, after all, who helped invent the uniquely Catalan Modernista style of architecture and design and who elevated the style to both a spiritual plane and a monumental scale with his legendary (and still unfinished) “expiatory temple” of La Sagrada Familia, a sort of surrealistic cathedral. This is the city, too, of Miro and Picasso. The latter wasn’t born in Barcelona, but he developed his talents here as a young man. And his landmark painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” depicts the “ladies” not of the French city of Avignon but of Barcelona’s Carrer d’Avinyo, or Avignon Street.

Barcelona is also famous for its wealth of Gothic architecture and, today, for the dazzling array of ultracontemporary Olympics-inspired projects, either recently completed or still in the works by such international architectural celebrities as Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster and Barcelona’s own Ricardo Bofill.

What really makes the city visually unique, though, are what are called in Catalan its espais urbans , or “urban spaces”--the aforementioned new parks, squares and such. During the four decades of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, it is said that not one new park was built in Barcelona (the city was violently anti-Franco during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently paid the price) even though its population increased from about 1 million to nearly 3.5 million during that period. Since 1980, as if to make up for this neglect, the city has committed formidable creative and financial resources (an estimated $6.4 billion has been spent on all aspects of urban renewal in the city in the past 11 years) to a stylish reinvention of the urban landscape--turning junky industrial ruins into public facilities of various kinds, humanizing streets and disused sections of the waterfront and in general making the place more livable and even better-looking.

Art critic Robert Hughes calls the espais urbans program “the most ambitious project of its kind that any government of a 20th-Century city has tried”--and in 1990, the city was awarded Harvard University’s prestigious Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design for its efforts. It isn’t quite correct to call Barcelona one big sculpture garden--there’s too much urban blockishness in between the artistic inflorescences--but it is certainly fair to say that for the art-loving visitor, or even just the casual tourist who likes to see and feel new things, there can be few cities in the world where the eye will be so frequently delighted or surprised, the sensibility so boldly challenged.

One surprising thing about the espais urbans program is that an American art dealer, Joseph Hellman of New York’s blue-chip BlumHellman gallery, has contributed significantly to its success. His cooperation in the city’s efforts was secured by Catalan sculptor Xavier Corbero, who had himself lobbied successfully with the city for a comprehensive public-art program to accompany the creation of the espais urbans . Hellman brought works by such prominent American artists as Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Cossje van Bruggen, and Bryan Hunt to Barcelona, thereby establishing world-class standards for public art in the city. (Artists commissioned by the city are paid about $20,000 for each work to cover their expenses, a fraction of the price they usually command.) The espais urbans program, it must be said, is not without its detractors. The city has installed many of its new parks and public art in out-of-the-way working-class neighborhoods, supposedly as a way of beautifying them and of linking them spiritually with more heavily trafficked parts of the city. Local community leaders aren’t always happy with this largesse, sometimes referring to the espais urbans as places dures , or “hard squares.” Maybe all they wanted was a little patch of grass where their kids could play soccer and a few benches for the pensioners to sit on--not some Ellsworth Kelly monolith or Buck Rogers lamppost. A more visceral expression of public disapproval may be seen on the art and the park structures themselves: Almost all of them are marred with graffiti, even the best sculptures by the best artists--though the city cleans them periodically, and hopes to have them in good repair by July, when the Olympics begin.

Barcelona is a large city, and, as noted, the espais urbans are spread out all over the place. To see them all, even superficially, would take a week or more. Luckily, some of them are located in parts of town well known to tourists and easily accessible. An old public space with a new addition, for instance, is the exquisite little Placa del Rei, in the Gothic Quarter in the ancient center of town. Here, next to a scattering of metal cafe chairs and tables, there is now a strong, dense, close-to-the-ground bronze by the Basque artist Eduardo Chillida--Spain’s most famous contemporary sculptor--which seems to echo the shape of the square without mocking it. Not far from the Gothic Quarter, near the Parc de la Ciutadella on the Passeig de Picasso, stands a love-it-or-hate-it piece called “Homage to Picasso,” by another major figure in contemporary Spanish art, Barcelonan Antoni Tapies. A glass box filled with an arrangement of metal bars, old furniture and pieces of cloth, set in a pond with water running down its sides, it can be a hauntingly powerful evocation of the urban artist’s life, at least when the water’s running.

Another highly visible piece of public art--you pass it on the way to the airport--and one that has thus far remained unblemished is Miro’s 82-foot-high “Dona i Ocell,” or “Woman and Bird,” in the Parc de l’Escorxador (on the site of an old escorxador , or slaughterhouse), also known as the Parc de Joan Miro. The piece is a simultaneously phallic and feminine form--a kind of Catalan surrealist joke, probably--faced in multicolored ceramic tile and topped with a form that suggests a bull’s horns more than a bird. (One of Barcelona’s two bullrings is just across the street.)

Not easily accessible but well worth visiting is the Parc de la Creueta del Coll--which is even harder to find than it is to pronounce. (Take a cab, and ask the driver to wait.) Set into the hills of the working-class El Carmel district, in a disused stone quarry above Gaudi’s famous Parc Guell (itself a remarkable urban space), the park seems to grow out of the rock organically, with its paths and Mediterranean-port-like terraces and pools--the largest of which is in fact a very agreeable swimming hole, beloved by neighborhood children in warm weather. An impressive Ellsworth Kelly Cor-Ten piece, one of his “Totem” series, stands at the entrance of the park. The artistic high point of the park, though--and one of the most memorable pieces of sculpture in Barcelona--is Chillida’s “Elegy to Water.” This is a huge, dynamic, clawlike form suspended on cables over a pool set into a cul-de-sac at the back of the park. A sinuous wooden footpath takes visitors into the canyon, to within a few feet of the sculpture. From here, the piece and its reflection are stunning--especially in the dimming, purplish light of early evening.

On the other side of these hills, to the north on the edge of the Vall d’Hebron, is one of the city’s new Olympic venues (most are on the other side of the city, on Montjuic), the Velodrom d’Horta. Here, alongside the stadium, Catalan poet Joan Brossa has created a particularly moving, even melancholy “visual poem.” It begins with a huge stone capital A , in block type. Then, along a stretch of lawn, stone punctuation marks-- parentheses, brackets, colons, periods--are pressed into the ground. Following these is another stone A , this time lying in ruins. However you interpret it--as a life metaphor, as a commentary on the suppression of the Catalan language by Franco, whatever--it is a very effective piece.

Anyone who drives into Barcelona from the north is likely to enter town along the Avinguda Meridiana, a broad raised boulevard lined with drab apartment blocks that feeds onto the Avinguda Diagonal and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. Virtually everything the casual visitor to Barcelona will want to see and do lies to the west of the Meridiana--but to the east, in the neighborhoods of Sant Andreu and Sant Marti, there is an especially large concentration of noteworthy espais urbans.

One must-see among them is the Placa de la Palmera, a refreshingly clean-lined space (with an old-fashioned orchestra pavilion) in the midst of another concentration of drab apartment buildings, through which sweep two 170-foot-long curves of thin white wall--a piece by Richard Serra. The piece invites inevitable comparison to the same artist’s controversial “Tilted Arc”--a 120-foot-long curved Cor-Ten work installed in 1981 on New York City’s Federal Plaza and destroyed in 1989 after complaints by office workers and city officials that it was dehumanizing and inconvenient--but this one is far more delicate, and defines the space it traverses rather than (for better or for worse) truncating it. Some locals have apparently complained that the walls divide a children’s playing field from a spot where their parents might perch to watch them play, but others welcome the way the piece separates the park’s recreational and contemplative functions.

The Parc del Clot, a dozen blocks or so southwest of the Placa de la Palmera, is one of the most appealing of the espais urbans and one of the most dilapidated. Occupying the site of an old railroad yard, the park, most of it sunken slightly below street level, deftly incorporates elements of previous construction on the site--including pieces of stone wall from now-demolished buildings, a strangely elegant brick smokestack and a portion of the old railroad mechanical workshop, cool and graceful with its slender red-brick arches supported by black cast-iron pillars. Within this structure, American artist Bryan Hunt has installed a splendid sculpture, a sort of saraband for two figures--one quasi-neoclassical, the other minimalist. Unfortunately, old walls and new sculpture alike are scarred with graffiti--and the light towers here, triangular and grid-faced, are so graceless and in such bad condition (peeling paint, broken glass, rusting seams) that they suggest some faded, cheap Mussolini modernism rather than something contemporary and Catalan.

If you go six or eight blocks north of the park on the Carrer del Clot, you’ll come to a point that overlooks Barcelona’s most beautiful contemporary bridge--the Pont de Felip II-Bac de Roda, connecting the two streets of those names across another railroad yard. The bridge is positively sensuous in form, with fluid curves, harp-string braces and streamlined fins at both ends.

On the other side of the Carrer del Clot from the bridge is the Placa del General Moragues, a small square graced with two very successful Ellsworth Kelly sculptures. Facing each other across a gently sloping patch of sand, one is a silvery shaft flaring slightly at the top (another “Totem”) while the other is a kind of double shark’s fin sailing toward its companion; the space between the two becomes part of the piece.

These two Kelly works were originally destined for the considerably larger Parc de la Pegaso, not far away. For whatever reasons, they never made it, and neither has any other sculpture thus far--but this park doesn’t need sculpture. Here, you’ll find a large, calm oasis full of plashing fountains, glistening pools, pretty bridges, inviting benches, winding paths of brick and paving stone, lush grass, rich vegetation, attractive red brick walls and gray metal arbors. This isn’t an art park or an architectural statement. It’s just a place to enjoy.

Some other urban spaces worth visiting include: the Barcelona Pavilion on Montjuic, designed by Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona--this was the source of the famous Barcelona chair--and later dismantled (considered the crowning achievement of the architect’s European career, it was reconstructed in 1986); the Parc de l’Estacio del Nord, a small park with a strong sculptural piece by Beverly Pepper; the Fossar de la Pedrera, an environment-monument by architect Beth Gali, also on Montjuic, and the Placa de Soller, an interesting multilevel park surrounding Xavier Corbero’s luminous but sadly vandalized marble sculpture “Homage to the Islands.”

Perhaps the most spectacular achievement of the city’s urban-renewal program, though, is the way it has given the sea back to Barcelona. Ever since the main industrial railroad line was laid here in 1848, the city has remained virtually severed from its waterfront--a great Mediterranean capital out of touch with the sea. Now, though, the railroad line is being relocated underground, new beaches and seaside parks are being constructed near the Olympic Village (itself opening freely onto the Mediterranean) and the Passeig de Colom, which stretches from the foot of the Ramblas and the famous statue of Columbus to the beginnings of Barceloneta, has been expanded, beautified and made easily accessible to all.

The Moll de la Fusta, or “Timber Wharf,” is the centerpiece of the Passeig de Colom--a trellised balcony of stone and concrete lined with a row of informal indoor-outdoor bars and restaurants that give both life and focus to the structure. Beneath this balcony, and connected to it by several handsome red pedestrian drawbridges in a sort of minimalist-Dutch style, is a sparkling new seaside esplanade, accented with palm trees and with wrought-iron streetlights based on late-19th-Century models.

The most conspicuous piece of art on the Moll is commercial and not civic in origin--a huge, grinning, three-dimensional comic-book lobster called Gambrinus, atop one of the Moll’s restaurants, also named Gambrinus. The restaurant was co-designed by the prolific artist-designer Mariscal, also responsible for the ubiquitous Olympic mascot, Cobi. Mariscal’s whimsy is expressed here not only by the lobster but also by an entire terrace embellished with metal cutouts of fish, stars and cartoon body parts and with oversized white canvas umbrellas covered with Mariscal doodles. It’s not Chillida or Serra, and it’s not exactly an espai urban --but it sure is a nice place to sit back, have a glass of wine and some tapas and think about all you’ve seen.

GUIDEBOOK: BARCELONA BY EYE

Getting there: Iberia Airlines flies nonstop to Madrid every Wednesday and Sunday, with hourly connections to Barcelona. Good connections are also available on various airlines through London, Amsterdam, Zurich and Frankfurt, and Iberia flies nonstop from New York to Barcelona twice a week. Additional flights may be available this summer, thanks to the Olympics.

Finding the Urban Spaces: The Barcelona city government publishes an indispensable fold-out pamphlet called simply “Barcelona Espais Urbans.” Though available only in Spanish and Catalan, its maps are detailed and clear, with photographs--and Metro (subway) and/or bus stops for many espais urbans are indicated . The pamphlet is available from the information office at the Palau de la Virreina, 99 La Rambla.

Hours: Most parks are open from 10 a.m. to between 7 and 9 p.m., depending on the season. (They stay open later in summer.)

Getting around: The Barcelona Metro system is clean, efficient and well marked, and it serves the majority of the most important espais urbans. The fare is 75 pesetas (about 70 cents) per ride, with tickets available from easy-to-use vending machines. Only the large stations are staffed with live ticket sellers, so come equipped with pocket change for the machines. Taxis are plentiful and inexpensive in well-traveled areas and around tourist destinations but might be hard to flag down in outlying areas.