It was a summer afternoon in 1989 when Aldo Rossi arrived in Barcelona to visit the historic market of Sants. He moved slowly, his gaze wandering over the space with the quiet focus of someone searching for a half-forgotten memory, although he had never visited the place before. His eyes seemed to shine through the surfaces as if light were penetrating the architecture and illuminating its forms, history, hidden layers, and the echoes of past lives. For Rossi, places were never really new. Every building, street, or fragment of wall carried traces of other places—some he knew, others he had only imagined. Was it the proportions of the ceiling? The rhythm of the light falling through the clerestory windows?  The spatial cadence of the market stalls is reminiscent of church pews? He rarely looked for direct similarities.

Instead, he paid attention to the resonance and the corresponding atmospheres between geographically distant but meaningfully close places. As he wandered through the hall reading the building, he paused, sensed, and let time pass around him. He took in everything: the vendors arranging their goods, the texture of the tiles worn by decades of footsteps, the warm sound of commerce. He watched a fisherman at work, gutting and arranging his fresh catch with practiced ease, his hands moving in a rhythm marked by habit and necessity.1

One detail caught his eye: gloves hanging above a fish stall. Although mundane, even forgettable, they spoke to him poetically - as an embodiment of presence, absence, and gesture. These fish stalls gathered in the heart of the market hall, forming its center of attraction, where life and architecture intertwine most clearly.2

The Invitation

In early 1989, the Catalan architects Yago Bonet Correa, Francesc López, and Alex Mullor invited Aldo Rossi to participate in the renovation of the Sants Market, a project commissioned by the Board of Concessionaires at the time.

The project was not the result of a public competition but a direct commission, which was common practice in Sants at the time. Architectural projects were often entrusted to local architects with deep ties to the neighborhood. In this case, the initial assignment went to Alex Mullor, who was born and raised in Sants and was already well-known within the local community. Trust and mutual understanding played a crucial role in this process. Mullor then invited Francesc López and Yago Bonet to join the project – the latter later bringing Aldo Rossi into the team through their longstanding personal and academic friendship.

Bonet, the leading architect of the project, was a professor and a pivotal figure in the Spanish architectural discourse at the time. His collaboration with Rossi had a long tradition: in the 1970s and 1980s, Bonet had worked closely with Rossi as professor and coordinator of a series of international seminars on contemporary architecture (SIAC) organized by regional architecture associations in Santiago de Compostela (1976), Seville (1978) and Barcelona (1980). The SIAC seminars focused on revitalizing historic urban areas affected by industrial development, such as Belvís in Santiago, La Cartuja in Seville, and Poblenou in Barcelona, to reconcile collective memory with contemporary interventions.3

The 1989 invitation continued this academic dialogue, attempting to translate Rossi's theoretical depth and poetic sensibility into a concrete architectural design. Bonet and his colleagues sought an architectural gesture that acknowledged, rather than overwrote, the site's complex history. With López and Mullor, Bonet planned a design to preserve the Market’s memory while opening up new architectural perspectives. The merchants whom Rossi and the architects had spoken to played a significant role in the design process. By sharing their personal and biographical stories relating to the market, they had a profound impact on Rossi's understanding and approach to the design.4

On his visit to Barcelona, Rossi explored the market hall and spoke with the architects. These conversations often developed slowly and rarely focused on the building itself. Rossi spoke of the city as a living structure of space and memory. Pausing in doorways, stopping at squares and street corners where others might pass by, Rossi's presence was light and intense, as if every city fragment held a hidden key. The conversations revolved around analogy, overarching structures, and symbolic relationships. Rossi refined a method in which design becomes a form of memory work - overlaying references, images, and spatial types to create an architecture that speaks beyond function and becomes an autobiographical experience. Places and things change through the superimposition of new meanings. This idea – a design characterized by memory and reflection – was at the heart of the discussions about the Sants Market. It became a way of anchoring the project within the broader spatial narrative of the Sants district, with its streets, squares, and remaining industrial presence.5 Rossi developed this approach in the 1970s when modernism was still the singular solution. In his Scientific Autobiography, he reflects: “It is evident that every object has a function to which it must respond, but the object does not end at that point because functions vary over time.”6

Rather than submitting to a homogenizing ethos, he responded with more nuanced and heterogeneous designs that embraced collective memory. Going beyond functionalist doctrines, understanding architecture as a field of continuity and transformation, that draws from both rational and poetic elements, where “the city emerges as a locus of collective memory, imagination, and action.”7

When the Sants project was initiated, Barcelona was undergoing a period of significant change. Since 1986, the city has been preparing for the 1992 Olympic Games. Although the commission to renovate the market hall was not linked to these efforts, it could be argued that Rossi’s involvement was a product of the times. Before 1992, Barcelona was more of an industrial city than a tourist destination. It was with the emergence of the Olympic Village that the city began to open up to an international audience, led by local architect Oriol Bohigas, who oversaw the transformation of the industrial coastline into a public space open to the sea. In addition, well-renowned architects from the national and international scene, such as Santiago Calatrava (Montjuïc Communications Tower, 1992) and Arata Isozaki (Palau Sant Jordi, 1990), contributed their expertise. Richard Maier's MACBA, completed in 1995, extended the momentum of the Olympic-driven transformation. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Rossi, one of the most influential architectural thinkers of the 20th century, was intrigued to intervene in a space so closely linked to the history of the working class in Barcelona. Unlike the large-scale infrastructure projects transforming the port district or the Olympic Village, the Sants Market was a different kind of commission - smaller in scale but no less significant in its symbolic and urban resonance. Rossi sensed from the outset how demanding this project would be – precisely because the building itself “was remarkable, and not easily overwritten.”8

The Market as Theater

Designed in 1892 by architect Pere Falqués i Urpí and inaugurated in 1913, the Sants Market rose at the heart of a once-industrial village district. Although annexed to Barcelona in 1897, Sants retained its identity as a working-class stronghold, primarily shaped by the Vapor Vell textile factory. The former factory houses a public library today, but its towering chimney remains a potent emblem of Barcelona’s once-thriving textile industry.

Often associated with Catalan Modernism, the Sants Market's stylistic identity combines decorative elegance with industrial pragmatism. The building consists of three large naves, built from visible brickwork and a metal-wood roof structure. The market hall occupies an entire block in the Sants district and has been a vital part of the neighborhood's social and economic fabric since the end of the 19th century, when an open-air market used to take place not far from this site. The basilica-like floor plan with its towering central nave and smaller side aisles conveys a feeling of grandeur and openness. The market's facade features modern ornamentation with decorative brick details, ceramic inlays, and colorful tile mosaics, creating a lively interplay of texture and color. Falqués, who served as Barcelona's municipal architect from 1889 to 1914, is best known for his design for the cast-iron lampposts and benches on Passeig de Gràcia (1906), an iconic example of functional urban ornamentation.9

The original market layout featured an oval arrangement of stalls clustered toward the center of the hall. While this central concentration echoed traditional market configurations, it often resulted in awkward circulation paths and obstructed views through the space. Rossi and the team approached the project by reconsidering the original oval layout and rotating the arrangement of the stalls by ninety degrees. This gesture required minimal effort but had a significant impact; it changed the inner rhythm of the market, allowing the pillars to be perceived freely in space without losing some of the market's original features. The new orientation opened up lines of sight, it more clearly aligned the interior with the building's structural logic – what Mullor and López described as treating the market as a small, self-contained city: a historic city with streets and squares. They compared this analogical process to a stage performance or a chess game: while the setting, like the city’s grid, is fixed, the performance or the game plays out differently each time, guided by intuition and the specifics of the moment.10

The rotation of the ellipse placed the core in the central nave, clarifying the spatial rhythm and creating a genuine urban square within the building. The rotation also improved connections to the main entrances, as the ellipse now stretched along the axes of those. The structural logic encompassed not only the physical framework but also a rethinking of the market as an urban space, with its streets and center, echoing Rossi's analogical approach and his idea of the market as a civic stage. The architects also imagined a vertical reconfiguration: a gallery of stalls suspended just below the skylights, offering an elevated, almost church-like perspective. What was once dense and introverted became more open and attuned to light and flow.

These interventions were never merely technical. They drew from a more bottomless well of remembered forms Rossi had internalized through travel, study, and drawing. Among them was the vast nave of Ferrara Cathedral and its Loggia of Merchants, an open arcade where commerce and civic life overlap. Ferrara's layering of structure, space, and use gave Rossi an architectural analogy for the market.

“This freedom of typology, once established, has always fascinated me as a problem of form. On this subject I could cite numerous examples, but I would be repeating things I have already said. Certainly, I have always been enthusiastic about the taverns set up under the huge arches of the Schnell-Bahn in Berlin, the two-story kiosks that sit behind the cathedral in Ferrara, and many other things where a particular function causes an event to unfold beneath the most unexpected roofs.“11

Similarly, the elliptical layout of the stalls in Sants recalled the enclosed oval of Lucca's Piazza dell’Anfiteatro for the architects, where geometry, memory, and social ritual converge.12 Rossi's associations were not nostalgic but methodological. As López and Mullor recall, they formed part of Rossi's analogical method, in which fragments of built history are not quoted literally but reinterpreted and recomposed. In this way, the Sants Market was never conceived as a neutral infrastructure but as a civic interior layered with historical, typological, and emotional resonances.

In his Scientific Autobiography, Aldo Rossi returns to his recollections of Barcelona on three occasions, whereby the city's markets provoke his most vivid memories as spaces where urban life is laid bare in its most direct and visual form. In a striking passage, he writes: "[…] the quantity of food on display never fails to impress me. Meat, fruit, fish vegetables appear again and again at the various stalls or sections into which the market is divided, and the fish are particularly striking: they have such varied forms and appearances that they always seem fantastic in our world."13

For Rossi, the market was not a monument to preserve but a palimpsest to be read — a place layered with uses, gestures, and time. Its elliptical plan, the worn surfaces, and the repetition of stalls suggested a typological continuity. He compared the market to the form of ancient courtyards and theaters—enclosures that do not simply contain space but encode memory:

"When I think of markets, however, I always draw an analogy with the theater, particularly the eighteenth-century theater, with its relation between stages as isolated places and the total space of the theater. In all of my architecture, I have always been fascinated by the theater, although I have done only three projects connected with it: the early project for the Teatro Paganini in the Piazza della Pilotta at Parma: the 1979 project for the Little Scientific Theater, and, more recently, the floating theater at Venice."14

Theatricality, for Rossi, was a spatial device, which is evident in the way the design for the Sants Market unfolds. The gallery overlooking the stalls, the section carved to catch light from above, and the elliptical circulation below all work together to choreograph movement and gaze. The space becomes a civic stage: open, rhythmic, and collective.

The vision for the Sants Market endures as a drawing, a conceptual exercise, and a reflection on what markets represent in the city. In Rossi's view, markets are places where daily life is concentrated and made visible, and human ritual takes shape.

Invisible Distances

Aldo Rossi's architectural journey transforms from the idea of architecture as wholeness to the poetics of incompleteness. His early theoretical text, The Architecture of the City, emphasized typology, permanence, and the collective memory embedded in urban form. For Rossi, architecture was a stable reference system shaped through recurrence and grounded in shared meaning. However, in the later years of his life, this focus began to shift. What had once been a formal theory grew increasingly lyrical: he turned toward fragments, recollections, and misplaced objects. The project for the Sants Market belongs to this later period. It is not a definitive statement.

In his 1990 journal article Invisible Distances, Aldo Rossi refers to Goethe's Werther, who returns to his hometown, where he is disturbed to find everything changed. Rossi conveys to the reader that architecture, like life, is associated with longing and loss. He suggests that architecture must only be "a few clods of earth" — enough to hold love or death but not truth in any definitive sense.15

Walter Benjamin, whose writing Rossi quotes directly, is a central reference in his reflections. In the same article, he invokes the German philosopher, citing what he calls “one of the most beautiful images” and an aspect of his work: “To emerge from our shells in order to listen to the world’s sounds, or to those of our century…”16

According to Gutiérrez, with this line, Rossi refers to Benjamin’s text Berlin Childhood around 1900,17 where the philosopher describes a moment of profound attentiveness; “Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear? Not the noise of field artillery or of dance music à la Offenbach,[…] No, what I hear is the brief clatter of the anthracite as it falls from the coal scuttle into a cast-iron stove, […] And other sounds as well, like the jingling of the basket of keys, or the ringing of the two bells at the front and back steps.”18

Gutiérrez argues that Rossi's trajectory mirrors Benjamin's: both began with structured, theoretical approaches and moved toward fragmentary, poetic modes of expression. In the preface of his selected writings, Rossi remarked that Benjamin's pages explain his thoughts better than he was capable of doing.19 This parallel between architect and philosopher is significant for interpreting the Sants project. Like Benjamin's unfinished Passagen-Werk, Rossi's architecture gathers fragments — not to unify them into a complete picture, but to allow their differences to speak in constellation. 

In Invisible Distances, Rossi also refers to the Ise Shrine in Japan, which is rebuilt every 25 years, and notes that it is not the material that remains, but the memory that is revealed in recognition and repetition over time. Similarly, the memory of the Sants market does not lie in the permanence of the brick, but in its meaning and the rituals of its use. These fragments connect people to places, which Rossi refers to as the nodal point of unity which must be rediscovered.20

Despite the richness of its conception, the Sants project was never realized. It was stopped by the Board of Concessionaires in spring of 1990 and according to Mullor and López, political and logistical challenges played a decisive role. Once the city council learned of Rossi's involvement in the design, it expressed interest in expanding the project into a broader urban initiative for Sants. Ultimately, this shift in ambition overpowered the project's original scope, leading to its cancellation. It can only be speculated whether the community might have revived the work in the years to come, but with Rossi’s unexpected death in 1997, the project lost its momentum – Bonet, Mullor, and López had turned to other assignments.

Yet even after its cancellation, the project continued to live on in the imagination and affections of the local community. In February 1991, during the annual carnival in Sants, both children and adults took to the streets wearing costumes that paid homage to the unbuilt market design.A Some dressed as oversized, colored pencils inscribed with the names of the architects, while others wore abstract, market-inspired outfits. A banner reading Rossi’s name was carried along the avenue. These images, shared by Alex Mullor, stand as a striking testament to the public's emotional investment in the project. In Mullor's words, this carnival became the last tribute to Aldo Rossi – a farewell staged through collective performance.

The market was eventually renovated in 2014 under the responsibility of the architectural studio Pb2 Project, with construction led by Llobet Bach & Associates.  Today, nearly half of the hall is occupied by a supermarket, while the other half continues to function as a traditional market with merchant stalls. This internal division reflects a broader municipal strategy: to preserve Barcelona’s historic markets while adapting to the rise of supermarket chains and the gradual disappearance of small vendors. As a result, the elliptical layout, typical of historical markets throughout the city and a feature the architects had intended to preserve — has dissolved.

The spatial similarities that carry from historic city squares to layouts of market halls are not mere reproductions or direct tributes. Instead, they seem to resonate across time, carrying signals that are unspeakable and intangible, yet undeniably present. Similarly, between what was designed but never built and what could have been lies a deep and elusive void, a space filled with speculation and recollections of an architectural vision.