Cebrià de Montoliu i de Togores (Palma 1873 - Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque is the largest city in the state of New Mexico, United States. It is the county seat of Bernalillo County and is situated in the central part of the state, straddling the Rio Grande. The city population was 545,852 as of the 2010 Census and ranks as the 32nd-largest city in the U.S. As...

 1923) was a Catalan town planner and architect, social reformer, and one of the introducers of the Anglo-Saxon culture in Catalonia. Montoliu translated many of Shakespeare's plays into Catalan and can be remembered as the great translator of John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

, almost unknown to the Catalan intelligentsia of the time.

In 1903 Cipriano de Montoliu participated as speaker in the Catalan University Congress. In the summer of 1907 is one of the signatories of the Manifesto for Spanish regeneration alongside names such as Gabriel Alomar

Gabriel Alomar

Gabriel Alomar was a poet, essayist, and educator of the early twentieth century in Spain, closely related to the Catalan art movement Modernisme...

, Josep Carner

Josep Carner

Josep Carner i Puig-Oriol , was a Catalan poet, journalist, playwright and translator. He was also known as the Prince of Catalan Poets.-Biography:...

, Amadeu Hurtado, his brother, Manuel de Montoliu, Josep Pijoan, Francesc Pujols

Francesc Pujols

Francesc Pujols i Morgades was a Catalan writer and philosopher.Morgades began to write poetry during his studies on secondary school, influenced by the work of Jacint Verdaguer and Joan Maragall. He took part in the literary competition Jocs Florals of Barcelona in 1902, and won the Natural...

, among others.

The influence of Ruskin had a powerful impact on Montoliu in believing in the power of transforming education and in 1903, Cipriano de Montoliu participated in a series of lectures on trying to convey what he had learned of the institutions of social culture in England and France. He was also a follower of great town planners such as Ebenezer Howard

Ebenezer Howard

Sir Ebenezer Howard is known for his publication Garden Cities of To-morrow , the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, that realized several Garden Cities in Great Britain at the...

 and Patrick Geddes

Patrick Geddes

Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and education....

 and met Geddes at the Civic Building Exhibition in Ghent

Ghent

Ghent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...

, Belgium in 1913. He proposed a museum in Barcelona which would open its doors to coincide with the International Electrical Exhibition that had been planned in the city in 1917. He was then influential in the development of Barcelona as a Garden City, and was noted for his ecological town planning. He has been described as an interpreter of modern urbanism.Notable works included Las modernas ciudades y sus problemas a la luz de la Exposición Cívica de Berlín (1913) and El sistema Taylor y su crítica (1916). The Barcelona City Council published a book about him in 1993.