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With bills unpaid, builders last week walked away from a project by Richard Rogers to transform Barcelona's Las Arenas bullring into a leisure and shopping center. Also in Barcelona, a €250 million ($341.5 million) Norman Foster redesign of the city's biggest soccer stadium, the Camp Nou, home of the famed Barcelona club, has been postponed indefinitely; and a 34-story office block by Frank Gehry and a complex of 10 towers by Jean Nouvel have been delayed.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, the high-profile Campus of Justice project, set to include structures by Rogers, Foster, Zaha Hadid, and London-based Alejandro Zaera Polo, has also slowed.

Spain's architecture boom was kicked off in the early 1990s when big names such as Foster, Gehry, and Arata Isozaki signed on to design buildings for the 1992 Olympic Games. Later that decade, the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao turned the town into an international tourist attraction overnight.

But finding financing has become nearly impossible in Spain since last year's housing bust, which left up to two million recently finished homes unsold and home values expected to fall up to 30 percent.

"There is neither the financing nor the confidence to go on," said Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper.