WITH ITS ICY roads and icy stares, Boston may be the least Catalan city on the earth. True, one can spot the occasional Barça jersey on the subway, but there is little Mediterranean warmth in this cold, northern city. Hispanic cuisine continues to make inroads, as it does everywhere in the United States (the Old Corner Bookstore has reinvented itself as the Old Corner Chipotle). But that generally comes from south of the border, not across the Atlantic. Spain seems far away; Catalonia even further.

So it is surprising that the city fathers turned over some of the most coveted commissions in the history of Boston and Cambridge to a Barcelona architect with a distinctly Mediterranean sense of his own identity. Like him or not, Josep Luis Sert painted an impressive canvas across the region. At the height of the last century, Sert built his Lego-like cubes all around Greater Boston, forever altering the skyline, especially along the Charles River. To this day, thousands driving into the city along Memorial or Storrow drives confront his modernist vision — a Catalan vision — of what a city should look like.

At first glance, the towers of Boston University’s Charles River campus and of Harvard’s Peabody Terrace apartment complex may not look all that Mediterranean. But they stem from a vision of Sert’s that he originated early in his career based on the humble dwellings of eastern Spain and its island of Ibiza. “The human scale” was a phrase Sert liked, as he wrote and spoke about what made these small houses work, with children free to run among them — there were no fences or cars. Sert strayed from this vision, as his commissions got bigger and the buildings more grandiose, and he followed the money to New York and Boston. But deep inside those structures, with their alternating window sizes and their effort to make concrete come alive with color and balconies, it is still possible to see the face of a fearless view of the future coming with great speed out of Barcelona a century ago.

Sert grew up there, privileged, and drank deeply from the wellsprings of Catalan creativity. Gaudi was a hero; Picasso (who grew up partly in Barcelona) an inspiration; Joan Miró a friend. As Sert began to find himself as an architect and planner, he celebrated what was all around him — modest Mediterranean dwellings, cube-like, that seemed to grow out of the earth like barnacles near the sea. In a speech he gave to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1934, he said, “We must stand up for an architecture of climate, a Mediterranean architecture designed for an internal sun.”

....

Boston’s winds, Atlantic winds, are not Mediterranean at all. They don’t caress — they punish. Especially if you happen to be standing near the base of a concrete skyscraper on a typical day in March. There were other problems with Sert’s Catalan vision — the concrete he painted with tends to age badly, so that his buildings have needed considerable maintenance. He once described Peabody Terrace as a chance to “bring the color and life of the Mediterranean” to the area, but there was not much color in his tall gray slabs. When these mini-cities for married graduate students were completed, the Harvard Crimson joked, “University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages.” To be fair, the huge buildings were filled with small, human touches, visible if you lived there — attractive woodwork, well-designed play areas for children, small convenience stores, a post office.

Yet the overall impact of these massive structures was a long way from the human scale of his early Barcelona projects. By the time Sert’s run at Harvard ended in 1969, he was out of touch with the new voices in the street. He did some more work in New York, then fled back to Ibiza, where he continued to lecture on the life-giving properties of the Mediterranean, until he died in 1983.

As a new building boom has hold of Boston, with $7 billion of construction underway, perhaps it’s time to get right with Sert. He made mistakes, but his architecture is as indelibly woven into the city’s fabric as that of Bulfinch or Richardson, and his overreach can teach as effectively as his early idealism. Few would disagree with his love of green space, his warnings about the destructive impact of automobiles on cities, and his incessant search for the human scale.

If utopian in some ways, Sert was also a realist, never more so than when he wrote in March 1964 for the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine: “Changes have to be accepted whether we like them or not.” The same might be said of Josep Luis Sert. His buildings are not going away anytime soon. We might as well get to know him.