The Call of Gaudí
Can One Barcelona Visitor Resist The Lure of the Modernist Architect?

 
By William Powers
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 26, 2009

When the waiter placed a steaming pot of paella in front of me, my hair was still damp from a Mediterranean swim. As I savored lemony forkfuls of rice and prawn at a Barceloneta Beach area sidewalk table, Barcelona's ocher beauty simmered decadently all around me. Equally delicious: daydreams of the midday siesta to come.
 
Barcelona offers so much that I figured I didn't need Antoni Gaudí to make my week-long vacation complete. Yes, I know what they say. When in "Barthelona," you absolutely must visit the Catalan super-architect's Sagrada Familia cathedral and his six other UNESCO-anointed masterworks. You, that is, and several million other visitors in lines snaked around corners, relentlessly pestered by Gaudí widget-hawkers.
 
No, I hadn't come to the Catalan capital for Gaudí, but rather for the seductive mix of languor and classy urbanism that has led Barcelona to be dubbed the southernmost city of northern Europe. No hammock-strewn Costa Brava hamlet, this. Taxis and buses whizzed by my table, high capitalism woven right into Spanish insouciance. Barcelona possesses everything from a thriving port to a top fashion and art culture; it's Spain with a pulse.
 
After my paella lunch, the city's energy buoyed my spirits so much that I didn't require that siesta. Instead, I strolled up one of the city's ramblas, or elegant pedestrian-only streets, through the majestic Placa de Catalunya and then -- unable to resist a peek -- took the back streets to Gaudí's Casa Mila, a large office building that wraps itself around a corner.
One look at Mila was enough to surface deep wells of ambivalence. I have, it seems, a love-hate relationship with Gaudí. Despite how touristy the place was, I couldn't help admiring how he ingeniously weaves nature's curves and angles into his designs. Nobody but Gaudí would have thought to give a building's rigid verticals a subtle lilt by mimicking the way people stand upright. I stood there adoring the Mila's cacophonous balconies and the way the entire building waved and rolled around the corner, as if a Mediterranean tsunami were flooding the city.
 
Not a man of small vision, Gaudí called another of his buildings -- the famous Sagrada Familia -- "the last great sanctuary of Christendom." Its design calls for 18 spindle-shaped towers to represent the 12 apostles, four evangelists, the Virgin Mary and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. Time did not affect Gaudí the way it does most people. Based on methods available in his era (Gaudí died in 1926), the cavernous Sagrada was to take not several years, but rather several hundred to complete. When criticized once for his long-term approach, Gaudí is said to have gazed slightly heavenward and replied: "My client is not in a rush." (Today, with computer-aided design and manufacturing technology, the projected completion date for the Sagrada Familia is 2026, the centennial of Gaudí's death.)
But just as I was falling under the spell of the Casa Mila, a shrill scream ripped into my eardrums. "Gaudí T-shirts!" a vendor cried. Tourists pressed in around me, snapping photos, and I was forced to ask the inevitable question: Was Gaudí now gaudy, so iconic as to cross the fine line of cliche?
 
I wondered how I would have felt about Casa Mila about a century back when it was mocked as La Pedrera ("the quarry"), or when George Orwell, who spent time in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, publicly announced a loathing for Gaudí's architecture. Quite ironically, I certainly would have adored it when it was so bitterly criticized. Something in me insists that everything popular must be wrong and prefers art that's out of favor, that shocks and even rebels. Alas, as the crowds oohed and ahhed, and bought Gaudí T-shirts and key chains, I turned and fled. I was after a Barcelona with a minimum of Antoni Gaudí.
 A Loft in Bohemian Raval

To that end I rented a small loft in the working-class and bohemian Raval district, far from the Sagrada Familia hordes. The owner, an anti-globalization activist and Irish expatriate with a shaved head and nipple rings, handed me the keys before disappearing into his adjoining loft with his Venezuelan boyfriend.
 
The New Yorker magazine recently noted that "a kind of restaurant-and-studio bohemia" is "still a possible way of life in Barcelona, perhaps," and I was curious about that. So I took the obvious first step: I bought some clothes.
 
I'm normally allergic to shopping, but I decided to indulge my inner metrosexual by buying a pair of hip leather shoes and two vaguely vintage-1970s button-down shirts. Feeling stylish enough for Barcelona, I hit the Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso museums, and then I strolled the halls of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and some private galleries to see what today's Catalan and Spanish artists were building on the foundation of Miró and Picasso. Not much, sadly. Both in the galleries and the patio-cafes where I eavesdropped as los artistas chatted about their work and their therapists, I sensed that the nihilistic work I kept seeing was linked to medium-size cases of ego absorption.
 
And it was difficult not to hold these artists up against the yardstick of Gaudí. In addition to being a devout Catholic, Gaudí championed Catalan sovereignty by subversively blending local culture into his designs and supporting the Catalan political party, the Regionalist League. He was even arrested by Spanish authorities in Barcelona in 1924 for answering them in Catalan.
 
Gaudí's selfless political resistance helped me come to grips with my rather selfish Catalan Problem. It went something like this: I'd stop at a Barcelona newsstand and pick up a copy of a periodical with a title I did not understand, like Avui or El Punt, and articles written in an annoyingly unintelligible jumble. In the background, I'd listen, baffled, to Catalunya Radio, feeling my displeasure grow. I'd spent years in Latin America untangling the imperfect tense from the preterite, only to arrive in the birthplace of Spanish and not be able to use it?
 
But there was the towering historical figure of Gaudí, heroically defending Catalan. He couldn't have known it then, of course, but if experts are right, half of the world's 6,000 to 7,000 languages may disappear by the year 2100. Languages, like species, get thicker around the equator, and so does their extinction; but endangered languages are found in Europe, too. Spunky of the Catalonians, come to think of it, to shield their regional tongue against a flattening McWorld onslaught.
 
Taking a break from linguistics, I rode the subway to Montjuic Park, with its panorama of the city and sea, and then strolled the Rambla de Mar in Port Vell on the old harbor, looking down at brightly colored fish in turquoise water. Luxury yachts bobbed farther out. Barcelona is said to have "turned its back on the sea," but this reputation is only partly deserved. When the city hosted the 1992 Summer Olympics, many industrial buildings along the waterfront were demolished and several beaches added; today there are seven beaches in the city.
 
The next day I stumbled upon Gaudí's Casa Batllo and reflexively drew an astonished breath. Stone can do that? Its pillars positively dripped down from the upper-story balconies of this private mansion turned architectural icon and tourist attraction. Its facade was luminous with crushed gold and greenish-blue ceramic tiles. This residence was art nouveau on crack, making the surrounding buildings appear excruciatingly bland. Locals call it the House of Bones for its organic, skeletal quality. The hour in line flew by as I gawked up at Batllo's brilliant form; then I went in and enjoyed the oval windows and flowing stonework.
 
That night, I had dinner in the Raval with an American friend living in Barcelona. We went out for drinks and dancing, and I found myself at one point talking enthusiastically about Gaudí. Batllo's nature cum elegance had lifted my spirits -- as did the actual spirits I was drinking. I even shared a little secret with her: Despite how touristy it is, I wanted to visit the Sagrada Familia.
 
"The Sagrada isn't even Gaudí's anymore," my friend said dryly. "It's Quintana, Boada and Cardoner's."
 
I was familiar with the argument. Civil war anarchists destroyed Gaudí's plans and models; so, since 1940, other architects, including the ones she mentioned, have carried the project forward based on what they thought Gaudí intended -- inevitably mingled with their own vision.
 
"But it's still his brainchild," I insisted, the liquor surfacing the love part of my love-hate relationship with Gaudí. I argued that the participation of generations of other, mostly Catalan architects makes the work that much more transcendent.
 
As I headed back to my Raval loft late that night, two chaps with bouncer builds picked me out of the crowd of partygoers on the street and asked in Spanish, "Where's the street with the hookers?"
 
I felt doubly irked. First, of all the people around, why me? I'd thought my newly purchased vintage shirt said "cool," but maybe it was screaming "pimp." They must have looked at me and thought, "Hey, he'll know where the hookers are."
 
Even more annoying, I did know where the hookers were. I'd just stumbled through the Ronda de Sant Antoni area, feeling initially flattered by the attention of one or two women until I realized there were 50 others, and not one of them dressed for Mass at the Sagrada Familia.
 
I sighed and expertly directed the gentlemen to their destination. The shorter of them flashed me an exaggerated you're-one-of-us wink before they disappeared into the Barcelona night.
 At Last, the Sagrada

Perhaps subconsciously atoning for the previous night's revelry, the next morning I visited the monastery across from my Raval loft. The chilly, incense-scented silence of the place did wonders for my hangover. I marveled at Islamic arches smack in the middle of this Christian building. After the Visigoths sacked Barcelona in the 5th century, it was conquered by the Moors in the 8th, and they left their curvy signature.
 
I walked deeper into history, into the Roman-gridded Gothic Quarter. One legend has it that Barcelona was founded by Hercules 400 years before the building of Rome. Around the birth of Christ, the Romans redrew the city as a military camp and baptized it as the colony of Faventia. I touched a Roman wall and got a sinking feeling -- sinking, that is, into a deep human history not nearly as evident at home in America.
 
While walking the next day through Gaudí's 42-acre Park Guell (named after the architect's benefactor, who funded Gaudí even as his contemporaries ridiculed the architect's work), I wondered whether the medieval and Roman architecture around him had influenced Gaudí's designs. I sat down on a bench, listening to two elderly men speak Catalan beside me, by now understanding every other word. I struck up a conversation with them in Spanish. They answered in that language, and the conversation eventually turned to Gaudí.
 
"They," one of them said, apparently referring to the imperialist Spanish occupiers from Madrid, "want to run a high-speed train right under the Sagrada Familia." I'd heard about this brewing controversy. The Spanish public works ministry announced it would dig a tunnel under the temple's not-yet-built principal facade. Sagrada engineers and architects argue that this rush toward "progress" could destabilize Gaudí's building.
"Our masterpiece destroyed for a tunnel?" the old man said, his voice choking up and slipping into Catalan. "We'll fight this."
 
On my last day in Barcelona, I arose before dawn and walked across the city to the Sagrada Familia. It was so early that I had the view to myself. Against a brightening sky wisped with clouds, I gazed up at the spindling towers and felt increasingly lightheaded. I could say that the temple is like lava flowing through honeycombs or that it echoes El Greco, but in truth it isn't like anything. That's when I realized something: It doesn't matter if the crowds loathe or love Gaudí. Real art, like nature, functions at a level far deeper than zeitgeist. Sagrada Familia exerted a steady force on me that was at once universal and unique. In the pink blush of a Catalan sunrise, it felt something like gravity, perhaps, or genius.
 
William Powers is an author. His most recent book is "Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle From Bolivia's War on Globalization" (Bloomsbury/Macmillan).