Faux Diaries: The Unbearable Kookiness of Gaudi
I am going to my happy place. I am walking on a beach in Barcelona. There are parrots in the trees. No one is punching me in the face. My head doesn't hurt. I don't require 12-14 hours of sleep. I have not made a doctor's appointment for next week, even though the doctor will only tell me to take some aspirin and not get into any more fist fights.
J and I head North, away from the sea and the Ramblas into L'Eixample, which we pronounce "Egg Hamper." L'Eixample is where Barcelona keeps its wackiest modernist architecture. I am informed that until recently, no one cared about Modernism and all of this beautiful tile and sinuous metal work had fallen into disrepair. We start at Casa Batllo, which is also called "The Dragon," because of the undulating roof tiled with scales and balconies that look like open jaws baring terrible teeth. Casa Batllo started out as an apartment block, but most of it is devoted to a Gaudi museum now. Gaudi is where Art Nouveau starts to go a little mad: away from the cute, the Victorian, and the twee, towards the psychedelic and the strange. The rooms in Casa Batllo are still designed with incredible attention to detail: Gaudi designed everything from the building itself down to the furniture and the fixtures. In some other house, he created the moulds for bronze door handles by grabbing a ball of clay and letting it squish out between his fingers. On the street in front of the house, the cement is pressed with a design of interlocking sea creatures. The only times when Casa Batllo fails to be beautiful are when the museum curators have added some ridiculous element: a screen saver projected against a wall, a holographic picture of the architect, an ugly little cement fountain in the attic room. I try to imagine myself living in a wood-paneled room with a whorled ceiling. It's not difficult, though it might be a little bit difficult to pull off in my Concrete Bunker.
We pass La Pedrera, another Gaudi apartment bloc, with its undulating facade and honeycomb front doors, its tangled balconies and spiraling towers, on the way to Sagrada Familia. If you are a fan of science fiction, Sagrada Familia is what you would expect a cathedral to look like if it had been designed by H.R. Giger, or perhaps aliens from space who had seen a cathedral once and were trying to recreate the thing from memory. In the great cathedral-building tradition, construction on Sagrada Familia has been ongoing for approximately 120 years. They have recently finished the roof and begun to guild the ceiling with a pattern designed to look like sun shining through the leaves of a forest canopy. The expected date for the cathedral's completion is somewhere between 2020 and 2040. Sagrada Familia is where Gaudi's three-pronged obsessions with nature, math, and God melded together until they became indistinguishable from one another. This is how you get hyperbolic paraboloid columns, quadratic surfaces and conic curves, and friezes embedded with cryptograms. The Cathedral of Saint Mary in Toledo was grand in order to impress onlookers with the power of the Catholic Church. Sagrada Familia is grand in the way that the sequoias are grand - it's just endless and miraculous and we're all very astonished and small in comparison.
Parc Gruell is also grand, which is funny because it was a bit of a failure. Located at the top of a hill in Gracia, the park was originally meant to be a housing development designed by Gaudi. The house in which Gaudi lived for the last twenty years of his life was the model house for this development, all trompe l'oeil purple-veined marble and curving nautilus staircases, lily pad chairs and colorful tiled chimney. I read somewhere that the house was not actually his own design. Only two show houses were ever built, and when there were no interested buyers, Gaudi purchased one of them and moved into it. The rest of the grounds have been converted into a park. When most people think of Gaudi, they think of Parc Guell, with its mosaic lizards and serpentine benches tiled in broken crockery. It's an idea that's been copied so often that for a long time in my mind, Gaudi was shorthand for "stick some broken plates to it." For some reason, everyone loves photos of the mosaics, so you never see the gingerbread gatehouses or the wrought iron palm frond fence or those whorled ceilings that look like the front room at Casa Batllo repeated over and over again, or the viaduct with its leaning columns made from piles of local stone. Immigrants of indeterminate origin appear out of nowhere and lay out cheap Spanish fans and sunglasses and plastic bracelets for sale. The world's smartest and fattest pigeon sits down directly under a water tap. We drink soda (I never drink soda) and sit in the shade next to the washerwoman column. It is not difficult to believe that the world is the creation of some benign and magnificent force, a force that makes mosaics that shimmer in the sunshine and tapas bars and very smart birds who know how to keep cool in the scalding heat.
And no one is punching me in the face.
J and I head North, away from the sea and the Ramblas into L'Eixample, which we pronounce "Egg Hamper." L'Eixample is where Barcelona keeps its wackiest modernist architecture. I am informed that until recently, no one cared about Modernism and all of this beautiful tile and sinuous metal work had fallen into disrepair. We start at Casa Batllo, which is also called "The Dragon," because of the undulating roof tiled with scales and balconies that look like open jaws baring terrible teeth. Casa Batllo started out as an apartment block, but most of it is devoted to a Gaudi museum now. Gaudi is where Art Nouveau starts to go a little mad: away from the cute, the Victorian, and the twee, towards the psychedelic and the strange. The rooms in Casa Batllo are still designed with incredible attention to detail: Gaudi designed everything from the building itself down to the furniture and the fixtures. In some other house, he created the moulds for bronze door handles by grabbing a ball of clay and letting it squish out between his fingers. On the street in front of the house, the cement is pressed with a design of interlocking sea creatures. The only times when Casa Batllo fails to be beautiful are when the museum curators have added some ridiculous element: a screen saver projected against a wall, a holographic picture of the architect, an ugly little cement fountain in the attic room. I try to imagine myself living in a wood-paneled room with a whorled ceiling. It's not difficult, though it might be a little bit difficult to pull off in my Concrete Bunker.
We pass La Pedrera, another Gaudi apartment bloc, with its undulating facade and honeycomb front doors, its tangled balconies and spiraling towers, on the way to Sagrada Familia. If you are a fan of science fiction, Sagrada Familia is what you would expect a cathedral to look like if it had been designed by H.R. Giger, or perhaps aliens from space who had seen a cathedral once and were trying to recreate the thing from memory. In the great cathedral-building tradition, construction on Sagrada Familia has been ongoing for approximately 120 years. They have recently finished the roof and begun to guild the ceiling with a pattern designed to look like sun shining through the leaves of a forest canopy. The expected date for the cathedral's completion is somewhere between 2020 and 2040. Sagrada Familia is where Gaudi's three-pronged obsessions with nature, math, and God melded together until they became indistinguishable from one another. This is how you get hyperbolic paraboloid columns, quadratic surfaces and conic curves, and friezes embedded with cryptograms. The Cathedral of Saint Mary in Toledo was grand in order to impress onlookers with the power of the Catholic Church. Sagrada Familia is grand in the way that the sequoias are grand - it's just endless and miraculous and we're all very astonished and small in comparison.
Parc Gruell is also grand, which is funny because it was a bit of a failure. Located at the top of a hill in Gracia, the park was originally meant to be a housing development designed by Gaudi. The house in which Gaudi lived for the last twenty years of his life was the model house for this development, all trompe l'oeil purple-veined marble and curving nautilus staircases, lily pad chairs and colorful tiled chimney. I read somewhere that the house was not actually his own design. Only two show houses were ever built, and when there were no interested buyers, Gaudi purchased one of them and moved into it. The rest of the grounds have been converted into a park. When most people think of Gaudi, they think of Parc Guell, with its mosaic lizards and serpentine benches tiled in broken crockery. It's an idea that's been copied so often that for a long time in my mind, Gaudi was shorthand for "stick some broken plates to it." For some reason, everyone loves photos of the mosaics, so you never see the gingerbread gatehouses or the wrought iron palm frond fence or those whorled ceilings that look like the front room at Casa Batllo repeated over and over again, or the viaduct with its leaning columns made from piles of local stone. Immigrants of indeterminate origin appear out of nowhere and lay out cheap Spanish fans and sunglasses and plastic bracelets for sale. The world's smartest and fattest pigeon sits down directly under a water tap. We drink soda (I never drink soda) and sit in the shade next to the washerwoman column. It is not difficult to believe that the world is the creation of some benign and magnificent force, a force that makes mosaics that shimmer in the sunshine and tapas bars and very smart birds who know how to keep cool in the scalding heat.
And no one is punching me in the face.