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La Sagrada Familia still under construction in Barcelona

How Gaudi's eccentric Barcelona architecture has shaped hearts and minds

To get a feeling for the Spanish city's multifaceted character, one could do no better than to follow in the footsteps of Antoni Gaudi. Words and pictures by Gary Jones.

Gary Jones

If all has gone to plan, the people of Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia will vote today to decide whether to seek independence. Though the unofficial ballot will be purely symbolic, should it take place, many here wish to be free of Spain and go their own way, and recent weeks have seen increasing numbers of Senyera-patterned flags being hung from wrought-iron balconies across the city. The red and yellow-striped standard is distinctive, flamboyant and eye-catching, and a perfect fit for the vivacious and spirited region in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain's second largest city, after Madrid, feisty Barcelona has long been a thrilling metropolis of politics and colour. It was a hotbed of anarchism during the Spanish civil war of the 1930s and an incendiary spirit of rebellion still resides in the city's DNA. Barcelona is also a thriving centre of fashion, art and literature, a relative heavyweight in a struggling economy, and home to (arguably) the world's most glamorous football team.

It's surprising, then, that the city's No1 son is not a charismatic, Che Guevara-like revolutionary, an effervescent entrepreneur or a supermodel-dating goal scorer. The man, past or present, who best represents Barcelona was an obsessive, celibate, penny-pinching and religiously devout architect, and marvellous monuments to his bizarre (some say "insane") genius loom and surprise across the city. To get a feeling for Barcelona's multifaceted character, one could do no better than to follow in the footsteps of eccentric Antoni Gaudi.

The interior of La Sagrada Familia

A pious Catholic first and foremost, Gaudi was also a fierce disciple of Catalan Modernism - a Barcelona-centred cultural movement that flourished in the final and first decades of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Believing he could never improve on what had been created by God, Gaudi synthesised neo-Gothic, art-nouveau and Middle Eastern elements in his work, and made recurring use of organic forms to suggest muscles, sinew and bones, flowers, trees and seashells, and echo the gentle geography and hues of Catalonia.

"Nothing is art if it does not come from nature," Gaudi decreed.

Seven of the late architect's creations located in Barcelona or its environs are Unesco World Heritage sites, and one of the kookiest is Casa Batllo, on Eixample district's Manzana de la Discordia ("Block of Discord"), so named for the clash in the styles of its buildings. With its egg and apple-shaped windows trimmed with stained glass, Casa Batllo was Gaudi's reimagining of an existing home, and a commission from a textiles baron in 1904. Though he chose a life of austerity for himself, Gaudi wasn't averse to spending rich folks' cash, and Casa Batllo has been described as "a decadent and deranged fantasy writ large".

Colour plays a central role in the Casa Batllo drama, and the building's garish façade is decorated with a mosaic of smashed ceramic and glass tiles in shades of blue, green and orange. It's believed Gaudi had been influenced by the legend of dragon-slaying St George (patron saint of Catalonia, and known in the region as Sant Jordi), and Casa Batllo's sensuous rooftop, covered in overlapping tiles, heaves and arches like a massive, magical reptile's scaly back.

The rooftop of the Casa Mila apartment building
Architect Antoni Gaudi
Casa Batllo's interior, with its erosion-inspired curves, muted palette and marine allusions, suggests a dream-like aquatic realm. The nickname for the building, however, is , or "House of Bones", and its balconies hint at sun-bleached ribcages or the jaws of great sharks. The skeletal stonework of lower floors features columns shaped like human femurs - remains of the dragon's victims, perhaps.

A short stroll northward stands Gaudi's surreal Casa Mila apartment building, which the architect designed and built between 1905 and 1910. Gaudi's client on this occasion was a married couple: rich developer Pere Mila i Camps and his even wealthier wife, the widow of businessman José Guardiola, who - like a number of Gaudi's deep-pocketed clients - had amassed a substantial fortune in Spain's American colonies. It's said that Barcelonians, when they ridiculed Mila's ostentatious manner, wondered aloud whether he was in love with "Guardiola's widow" or "the widow's " ("piggy", in Catalan, and referring to her bank account).

Chunky and more imposing than fanciful Casa Batllo, Casa Mila's eight floors form a rippling exterior of stone waves with "seaweed" balconies, forged in wrought iron, floating on their crests. Gaudi's increasing boldness aroused a negative reaction, however, and the building became known as , or "the Stone Quarry", for its brutal and rough-hewn finish.

Inside Casa Batllo

Today, Casa Mila is recognised not only for its artistic merits but also for architectural advances, such as its self-supporting façade, underground car park and segregated lifts and stairs for residents and servants. Hundreds of visitors converge on the structure every day, most agreeing that the high point is Casa Mila's undulating rooftop, which features massive ventilation ducts and chimney stacks, many sculpted to resemble gangs of Roman centurions.

Looking over low-rise Barcelona from Casa Mila's roof, a towering place of worship even more impressive than Barcelona FC's Camp Nou stadium is impossible to avoid. Gaudi began working on his awe-inspiring masterpiece - La Sagrada Familia, or "the Sacred Family Church" - in 1883, when he was 31 years old. He didn't think big, he thought gargantuan, envisioning curvilinear spires looming hundreds of feet towards the heavens and effortlessly dominating the Catalonian city that reveres him to this day.

Gaudi fully understood that the massive undertaking could never be completed in his lifetime, and whenever he was asked why progress was so slow, he would refer to his God.

"My client," he'd say, "is not in a hurry."

The dragon-inspired roof of Casa Batllo

La Sagrada Familia remains a work in progress, its ongoing construction financed by the millions of tourists who drop by each year to marvel at Gaudi's tangled forest of tree-like stone columns, each splitting into multiple branches and testament to one man's pathological desire to fuse the natural with the divine through architecture.

Gaudi's messianic mission was cut short, however, when he was struck by a Barcelona tram in 1926, and failed to receive immediate aid because his tattered clothing made many believe the architect was simply a beggar.

The year of La Sagrada Familia's projected completion is now set at 2026, exactly 100 years after his death. By then, if the separatists get their way, Gaudi's beloved and inspirational Catalonia might be the world's newest independent nation.

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Divine innovation
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