The outward extension of Barcelona inaugurated by the demolition of the city walls brought radically different ideas of how the city should be written, represented by the perspectives of the engineer Cerdà and the architects favoured by the dominant group of bourgeois merchants. Cerdà’s Eixample prioritised health and social equality, values which can be read in his plan. The ideas which underpinned the construction of the new city, however, were more elitist and with a strong Catalan nationalist rhetoric. The universal exhibition of 1888 showed Barcelona becoming aware of its position in the ecosystem of emerging global cities, determined to express this in its monuments and architecture. The buildings that filled the Eixample are notable for the rich semiotic content of their architecture, expressed through the style of Modernisme, and for the creativity of Gaudí and his contemporaries.