Barcelona appears in two sharply different accounts: as the site of secret cells designed to disorient prisoners in 1938, and as a railway waypoint in the reported disappearance of a manuscript connected to Walter Benjamin. The city’s clearest role is as the setting for an experiment that turned avant-garde visual ideas into an instrument of confinement.

The 1938 Colored Cells

A Spanish art historian’s discovery, reported in 2003, concerned secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938. Their designer was the French anarchist Alphonse Laureni, who conceived the cells as a contribution to the fight against Franco’s forces. The account describes this use of modern art not as an exhibition or a metaphor, but as the basis for a deliberately constructed environment.

The design drew on geometric abstraction associated with Kandinsky and Klee and on surrealism associated with Buñuel and Dalí. It also used avant-garde theories about the psychological effects of color. Barcelona is thus linked to a project in which artistic principles were repurposed for a coercive political purpose.

The Cells’ Spatial Design

The cells were six feet by three feet, with beds set at a twenty-degree angle. Bricks and other geometric blocks covered the floors, restricting prisoners’ ability to pace back and forth. The arrangement made the room’s dimensions and surfaces part of the method: rather than leaving the confined space visually or physically neutral, its design shaped what could be done within it.

The walls were curved and covered with patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals. Color, perspective, scale, and lighting were used to create confusion and distress; Laureni favored green because his theory assigned it an association with melancholy and sadness. The account’s precise attention to angles, measurements, patterns, and color makes the cells legible as a planned system in which aesthetic choices served a stated psychological function.

Barcelona as a Railway Waypoint

Barcelona also appears in a separate 2003 report recounted by the book, concerning Benjamin’s death in a Spanish border village in 1940. In that account, a briefcase holding his manuscript was entrusted to a fellow refugee and then lost on a train traveling from Barcelona to Madrid. Barcelona is therefore not identified as the place where Benjamin died; it enters the story as one point on the route associated with the manuscript’s disappearance.

The two accounts give the city distinct roles. In the first, Barcelona is the location of an intentionally designed system of confinement. In the second, it is a transit point in a story about a lost manuscript. The juxtaposition places a material urban setting beside two different kinds of historical claim without making the events part of a single episode.