The missing corners make room at the crossings
Barcelona’s Eixample is laid out in a regular grid, but its blocks are not square at the corners. Each corner is cut diagonally—a design called a chamfer—so the street edge retreats before two roads meet. Four chamfered blocks facing one another create a broad, roughly octagonal space at an intersection instead of a tight, right-angled junction.
That extra room mattered when steam trams ran through the city. A tram could not pivot like a small vehicle: it followed fixed rails, and its long body needed a generous curve. By setting buildings back at the corners, the plan gave the tracks more space to bend and reduced the sense of squeezing through a narrow crossing.
A street corner becomes a small public space
The cut-off corner also changed what an intersection felt like on foot. Rather than meeting at a sharp point, pedestrians encountered a wider opening, with more room to cross, pause, and see along the intersecting streets. The repeated shape makes these open areas part of the neighborhood’s everyday rhythm, not just unusual spots in the grid.
The design’s striking tradeoff is that it gives up a little building footprint at every corner to make the street network feel more open. Across many blocks, those small setbacks add up: Barcelona’s familiar broad intersections are built into the geometry of the city, not added as plazas afterward.
