It is a great thing that we have kept up our hiking timetable, up early and out the door. By doing so, we manage to get to places before the mob swarms in like flying locusts, they land everywhere brandishing selfie sticks. Humans preen and pose in the most awkward looking demonstrations of self-consciousness, why do they do it? We don’t know, but they put the preening pigeons to shame.
We have way too much to cover in one blog post; therefore, I am splitting things up into a couple of posts for today. Since we began and ended the day with Gaudi, we will start with him.
Park Guell
Originally, the land was two adjacent farms purchased by Guell. He intended to build an expensive housing estate and commissioned Gaudi to design it, but the lots did not sell, so the project was halted. The Guell family gifted the park to the city. At the time of its design, Catalanism was at a high; therefore, the park is loaded with Catalan symbolism and patriotism. Gaudi believed that Catalans were so different from Spaniards that there was no common ground between them, either culturally or politically.
One may interpret the ceramic reptile as a representation of the old shield of the French city of Nimes whose emblem was a crocodile. This represents the northern limit of the Old Catalunya in the time of the Frankish kings. Nimes was the twin city of Barcelona and was also a textile centre.
The cavern to which the stair leads is an emblem of Roman origins with the Doric columns and shallow dome vaults - the classical temple. Romanesque Catalonia, which I have completely ignored, is symbolized by the gloomy dry-stone porticos and arcades.
The serpentine benches of broken fragments were planned by Gaudi’s assistant, Jujol, who was a brilliant colourist in the design of mosaics and trencadis. It is said that Jujol was so inspired by the project that he smashed his own set of dinnerware to use in the benches.
The two Hansel and Gretel looking houses at the entrance were planned as porter’s lodges, to be used to receive guests at the estate. The roofs of the porter’s lodges are extraordinary, it looks like somebody went wild with fondant (icing) but they are made of ceramic pieces.
The Park Guell website urges visitors to purchase tickets online, but then you only have 30 minutes to gain entry from your purchased time slot. We didn’t know how long it would take us to walk there, so we decided to just go. We overshot (as usual) the main entry and ended up at the far entry where the tour buses park. The walk is pretty much uphill and there is an escalator somewhere, which is crazy, we took streets and steps up. When we walked up to get tickets, no other visitors where there so that all worked out very well. When we got to the area where you need an entry ticket there were a few busloads of Japanese tourists but not many other people were there yet. After a while it started to get very busy. We walked all over the park, there is a large area that does not require an entrance ticket as it is more like a natural park with trees and paths. When we left via the same entry, there was a huge lineup to get tickets, so it really does work well to get out there early in the morning.
Stone Portico
Serpentine Bench
Incredible trencadi design (broken tiles)
Note the white shards of dinner plates
Porter's Lodge
Porter's Lodge with delicious roof
Hypostyle Exterior
Hypostyle Room, Interior
Ceramic Salamander
Monumental Flight of Steps
This thing has eyes that shimmer in the sunlight
Portico of the Washerwoman
Casa Batllo 1904-1906
This is a conversion of an existing apartment building. The street level facade is an undulating band of stone-framed windows, the walls are covered in mosaic and the roof is a scaly dragon’s back. On a grey day the walls look subaqueous, on a bright day they look like a jewel box. One interpretation of the facade is that it represents a dragon and its lair. The curving balconies are mask-like, the skulls of the dragon’s victims. The window frames on the first floor are carved like bones and tendons while the curved gape of the windows is the dragon’s open jaw.
We didn’t go into any of the Modernisme houses, but the interior is brilliantly done. The stairwell is awash in light right to the bottom. To achieve this, the windows increase in size from top to bottom and a skylight brings in light from the top. The blue tiles get lighter in colour as they descend from floor to floor, the tiles go from cobalt blue, to sky blue to pearly grey to white at the bottom. Therefore, there is no dark pit at the bottom of the stairwell but the effect is very discreet.
Note the femur and tibia bone details in the windows
Reptile roof and mask balconies
Casa Mila (La Pedrerea - The Stone Quarry)
The facade is like a sea cliff with caves for people, the forged iron balconies represent kelp and coral. The whole surface of the building looks rather muscular. Rather than an internal staircase there is a spiral pedestrian ramp.
There is a lot of imagery of a medieval castle, the chimney and stairway exits on the roof are shaped like helmets of staring sentinels and centurions. Elegant catenary arches support the attic roof.
The construction was quite daring as the folds and trunks of stone are supported by a complex steel armature. All of the various curvatures are due to the wavy wall, the engineer had to hang chains between the columns and trace their curve to make the steel framing.
Balcony railings depict marine plant life
Roof chimney detail
Incredibly undulating structure
No balcony railing is repeated
Sagrada Familia (Holy Family)
The Sagrada Familia was begun by the Josephines, a lay association dedicated to Saint Joseph. They thought they needed a temple in Barcelona for people to go to pray and do penance for the sins of modernism. They bought a piece of land in an unfavourable part of Eixample, flocks of goats continued to graze around the temple in the 1890s.
In 1882, the first stone was laid, the plan was an ugly Gothic Revival by the architect Villar, but he quit the next year and they hired Gaudi in 1884. In the beginning, the Josephines had the money to finance the construction, so they gave Gaudi a free reign with the design. Gaudi designed inclined columns which would transfer the load straight to the ground with no outward thrust, this eliminated the need for buttresses to support the structure.
By 1910, interest had waned and funding ran out. Gaudi became obsessed with the temple and never stopped begging for money to support construction. By the 1920s, Gaudi was marginalized and popular opinion was that the Sagrada Familia was an overwrought mess of a building. Gaudi basically fell apart and became a gaunt old man, he absent mindedly wandered into the tram line and was hit by a tram on June 7, 1926, he died three days later in hospital at 74 years of age. Gaudi only saw one of his facades go up before he died, the Nativity facade, up to its rose window and only one of the spires on the Nativity facade.
After WWI, Modernisme was out and noucentaine was in, it was a movement toward the classic imagery of the Mediterranean and a relief from the elitist, social decadence of Art Nouveau architecture and decoration. The architecture was more classicist.
In the 1920s and 1930s most workers regarded Sagrada Familia with indifference or hostility, a symbol of the excess of their capitalist bosses and the clergy who served them. The Catalan anarchists hated it. In 1936, during the civil war, the anarchists attacked the crypt and the workshops of the temple, they destroyed all of the models, drawings and calculations, basically the whole archive, to ensure the temple would never be finished.
Since that time, the architects can only guess at Gaudi’s intentions for the remainder of the design. Gaudi tended to make things up as he went along, this level of spontaneity is part of the brilliance of this building, but has been missing in the last fifty years of work on the Sagrada Familia.
They are now using reinforced concrete and resin bonded finishes rather than stone, of course this bears no relation to the organic quality of the original material of the Nativity facade. Most of the construction in the 70s and 80s was total kitsch, the Darth Vader-like centurions which have been copied from the chimneys of Gaudi’s Casa Mila look fairly ridiculous. The temple is highly controversial but they are forging ahead, an estimated completion date is something like 2026, the one hundred-year anniversary of Gaudi’s death.
We didn’t like the exterior of this building at all, the original facade is interesting as the spires look like drippy candles. The old portion is organic, earthy, rough and artistic; whereas, the new construction is really ugly and the sculpture looks rudimentary with sharp lines. We think they should have left the original portions and not bothered with trying to complete the remainder of the design.
The inside is another matter, apparently it is fantastic, but we had no interest in going inside. The photos of the inside reveal splendid columns that look like trees and the space is awash in light from stained glass windows.
Nativity Facade
More recent construction
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