This is a book about identity and modernity. The first concerns the understanding of place and memory, the second the understanding of now - the now of the present and recent times. The circumstances of its recent political and cultural history, and its relative smallness, make Barcelona an excellent laboratory for examination, and its architecture the ideal medium through which to explore the issues. The chronology of the survey (1854-1939) marks off a coherent `time-slice' of social and architectural history, from the demolition of the restricting walls of the medieval city to the end of the Republic through civil war