Barcelona

by Robert Hughes

  One medieval complex in particular fired Gaudí’s imagination as a teenager, and that of his close friend Eduardo Toda i Güell. It was the monastery of Santa Maria del Poblet, in the Baix Camp of Tarragona, within easy reach of Reus. This once mighty Cistercian foundation had begun in the mid-twelfth century and had benefited greatly from the church building boom that also transformed Barcelona itself in the fourteenth, during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. Beginning with this monarch, all the kings of Aragon and Catalunya had been buried there. Hence, it was the national pantheon and its import, both historic and patriotic, was immense. As architecture it was the grandest Cistercian building in Catalunya, strong, severe, and plain. Its chapter house, nine vaulted square bays carried on four central columns, ranked with Santa Maria del Mar and the Saló del Tinell as one of the supreme formal utterances of early Catalan Gothic.

  But when Gaudí and Toda were boys, Poblet was a ruin and they conceived the mad, devout notion of restoring it to at least a memory, an eloquent vestige of its former glories. To them it was an archsymbol of Catholic supremacy and Catalan identity, and the liberals had ruined it in the name of freedom and rights. “What is this freedom?” young Toda demanded in an angry verse, if it meant

  to rip up the tomb-slabs

  and violate the sepulchres of heroes

  and sow terror and death everywhere …

  and smash monuments to rubble …

  if this is freedom, a curse on it!

  Thus in Gaudí’s mind, religious conservatism—the more extreme, the nobler—fused with the retention of Catalan identity. The Mendizábal Laws, having forced the Church to sell its property, had condemned Poblet to desertion and decay. Gaudí obviously could not undertake its restoration on his own. Patrons must be found. And he had to have his own career as an architect. In the end, no private person offered to pay for the renewal of Poblet, but Gaudí did find a patron for his own work—the sort of patron artists dream of, one who shares all their creative obsessions and does not question their cost. He was Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi, industrialist, rising politician, and quintessential grandee of the Catalan establishment.

  Gaudí’s first projects for Güell were a palace in Barcelona and a finca, a country estate, up the hill from Barcelona toward the medieval convent of Pedralbes. Of the Finca Güell, only the main gate and its flanking lodges were done to Gaudí’s design. But the gate (1884) is an amazing work, a huge guardian dragon in wrought iron, illustrating a poem by the laureate of Catalan religious verse, Jacint Verdaguer.

  The palace, which stands on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, is entirely Gaudí’s. With it, his maturity as an artist really begins, and it is the first of his buildings to justify his posthumous fame. It was his showpiece and he took infinite pains over its design, doing at least three complete versions of its facade before settling on the final one. Everything from the parabolic entrance to the wooden louvers that sheathe the tribune on its rear facade in a curved membrane like the scales of an armadillo bears the mark of an insatiable inventiveness.

  It is also intensely theatrical, which adapts it well to its present-day function as the library of the Institut del Teatre, the Theatrical Archive of Barcelona. This first emerges in the basement, where Güell stabled his horses and kept his carriages. Its rugged vaults spring from squat, fat, brick columns whose capitals are funguslike pads of cooked earth: a cavelike, Wagnerian crypt.

  From the start, Gaudí and Güell shared a taste for morbid penitential rhetoric. It would be refined and developed as time passed. Sometimes it produced a gloomy mélange. But at other times, when brought under strict control, the result was a masterpiece, as in the columns and capitals that support the screens of the miradors in Palau Güell. Cut and polished from the metallic gray limestone of Garraf, a quarry that belonged to the Güell enterprises, they look as radically new as Brancusi’s sculpture (which Gaudí, of course, had never seen). Their fairing and subtle concavities, their utter purity of line, seem to owe nothing to other sources, though they were possibly inspired by the thirteenth-century capitals in the refectory of Poblet.

  The other unique aspect of Palau Güell is its roof: It is truly a masterpiece, a beautiful acropolis of chimneys and ventilators, dominated by a central spire which contains the high slender dome of the main salon.

  There are twenty chimneys, all roughly similar in shape: an obelisk or cone mounted on a shaft, which sits on a base, the whole sheathed in fragments of tile or glass. This kind of tilework is ancient and predates Gaudí, although many foreigners wrongly suppose that he invented it. It is known as trencadis, trencar being the Catalan verb “to break.” It originated with the Arabs in Spain, but Gaudí was the first architect to revive it. It can cover curved surfaces, and it’s cheap, too, because the material can be scrap. Gaudí was fascinated by how the mosaic fragmentation of trencadis, its shifts of color and pattern, could play against the solidity of architectural form, dissolving its stability. It is at least plausible that trencadis lies at the root of cubism, because the young Picasso, living just down the Carrer Nou de la Rambla from Palau Güell, would have seen its chimneys any day of the week. They are a prelude to the trencadis-covered serpentine benches in the Parc Güell, which Gaudí and his brilliant but lesser known colleague Josep Marià Jujol created as part of a large (but financially unsuccessful) housing project on Mont Pelat above Barcelona.

  As an enlightened capitalist, Güell knew it was in his interest to reduce friction between workers and management. He thought this could be done by paternalism, avoiding the hard-fisted control that had caused riots, strikes, and machine breaking in other Barcelonan firms. So he decided to set up a self-contained colonia, or industrial village, for making cotton goods, velvet, and corduroy, south of Barcelona on the banks of the Llobregat River. Its workers would be isolated from the temptations of the big city. They could live, work, and pray together under the eye of the benign boss. All their needs would be taken care of. The Colonia Güell, as it was known, would have its own clinic and infirmary, its library, even a football club. Of course it would also have a church, which Gaudí would design.

  Gaudí started thinking about the church in 1898 and the first stone was laid in 1908. When Eusebi Güell died ten years after that, the crypt was still unfinished and the church’s walls above ground were scarcely underway. A few of Gaudí’s surviving sketches show a monster edifice with parabolic spires that would have looked quite out of place in the Catalan countryside, though one can well imagine Gaudí replying that medieval cathedrals would have looked incongruous in the flat acres of northern France at first. But though it is only a fragment of a dream, the crypt of the Colonia Güell’s church is one of Gaudí’s masterworks, a building that looks wildly and arbitrarily expressive until one grasps the logic of construction that removes it from the domain of mere fantasy and creates one of Europe’s greatest architectural spaces.

  He did this upside down, with string and little bags of bird shot. Drawing out the ground plan of the crypt, he hung a string from each point where a column would meet the floor. Next he joined the hanging strings with cross-strings to simulate arches, beams, and vaults, attaching to each string a tiny bag of bird shot, its weight carefully scaled at so many milligrams per pellet to mimic the compressive load at each point. None of the strings in these complicated cat’s cradles hung vertically. All the stresses in them were pure tension—the only way that string, which has zero resistance to bending, “knows” how to hang.

  Gaudí then photographed the string model from all angles (seventy-two photographs, representing the rotation of the model five degrees at a time, totaling 360 degrees or one complete turn)—and turned the photos upside down.

  Tension became compression and these “funicular” models (string models, in plain English, from the Latin funis, a cord) gave Gaudí a visual basis for making advanced and painstaking transferences. He could design forms without structural steel reinforcement that traditional masons could build in a brick-stone techn
ology, which had not changed since the fourteenth century, when the wide shallow choir arch of Santa Maria del Pi was built. Gaudí wanted to imagine a kind of space that was both new and deeply archaic. The columns that support the roof of the crypt are hexagonal “pipes” of basalt, brought from a quarry in northern Catalunya and set in lead instead of mortar. (This gives the joints an imperceptible but sufficient flexibility under stress, whereas mortar would crumble.) They lean in a way that recalls ancient forms of shelter: the cave, the ledge, the hollow trunk. One of Gaudí’s contemporaries, a friend of Josep Pla named Rafael Puget, called Gaudí “not an architect of houses, but an architect of grottoes; not an architect of temples, but an architect of forests.” It seemed so in the 1920s and still does today, and if you feel the crypt of the Colonia Güell is the great prototype of the far later, computer-designed structures by Frank Gehry, you are certainly right.

  Josep Jujol’s finest collaboration with Gaudí, apart from the Parc Güell, was done for another textile mogul: Josep Batlló i Casanovas. The Casa Batlló, on Passeig de Gràcia, was not done from scratch. It was a drastic conversion (1904-1906) of an existing apartment building from the late 1870s. By the time Gaudí was through with it, little survived of the original except the floor levels, and not all of those either. Jujol and Gaudí produced a new facade, an undulant sheet of mosaic wrapping around the windows (whose framing columns resemble bones)—a five-story crust of shifting, aqueous color which resembles nothing so much as one of Claude Monet’s “Nymphéas,” those enormous, shimmering paintings of light on water. It is one of the most exquisite sights in Spain, this jewel-box fantasy of a street wall surmounted by a roof made of what seem to be giant ceramic scales—which they are. The facade of Casa Batlló was meant to be read as an homage to Sant Jordi, patron of Barcelona. The scales belong to the dragon he killed, as does the serpentine hump in the roof. The white balconies, pierced with holes for eye sockets, are the skulls of the horrid reptile’s victims. The half-round tower set in the facade ends in a form like a garlic bulb (Catalans, one should remember, can never get enough garlic) surmounted by a cross. This is St. George’s lance, and its tip is inscribed with the holy and efficacious names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  Casa Batlló

  When it was finished in 1906 the Casa Batlló became the wonder of Passeig de Gràcia, and this distinction invited competition. It came from the other side of the street, a few blocks uphill, where one of Batlló’s friends, a property developer named Pere Milà i Camps, commissioned a new building from Gaudí. The Casa Milà, as it was called, was designed from the ground up, not adapted from an existing building. Its owner gave the architect a free hand. (By then it was clearly pointless not to give Gaudí complete design autonomy; without it, he would not consider a commission.)

  He produced a sea cliff with caves in it for people. Its forged iron balconies are based on kelp and coral incrustation. Though La Pedrera (“the stone quarry,” as Casa Milà was soon christened) looks formidably solid, with its massive projections and overhangs like the eye sockets of a Cyclopean head, it is much less so than it looks. The mighty folds and trunks of stone are actually more like stage grottoes. Despite its dramatic plasticity the stone is a skin and not, like true masonry, self-supporting.

  Thus the Casa Milà becomes a kind of hermaphroditic fortress: on one hand, its maternal aspect—soft swelling, shelter, undulation; on the other the bizarre and contradictory “guardians” on the roof, invisible from the street. These are intensely masculine, so much so that George Lucas’s costume designers based the figures of Darth Vader and the Death Star’s guards on them—air-breathing and smoke-bearing totems, helmeted centurions which serve as chimneys and ventilators for the apartments below.

  Rooftop of Gaudí’s Casa Milà

  Singular though it is, La Pedrera fell short of Gaudí’s original idea, a fact in which we are entitled to rejoice. Discussing Gaudí’s taste, an acquaintance of his once remarked, was like talking about the “taste” of whales, something enormous, remote, and, in the end, meaningless. In some areas, like painting, he seems to have had no taste at all: The most beautiful color effects on Gaudían buildings usually turn out to be the work of Jujol, and the paintings Gaudí favored were usually repulsive in their gloomy, saccharine piety.

  The same was true of his use of sculpture. It seems almost beyond understanding that a man who created some of the most marvelous three-dimensional forms of his time—for no other words will do for the chimneys of Palau Güell or the unfinished roof of Casa Milà—could have wanted to add to his work the sort of vulgarities Gaudí sometimes had in mind. A striking example was the sculptural allegory of the holy rosary (Rosario being the name of Milà’s wife) that he planned to put on top of the Casa Milà as its crowning feature, culminating in a figure of the Virgin Mary flanked by the archangels Gabriel and Michael, forty feet high and in bronze—the Virgin as colossus. The artist Gaudí wanted to do it was Carles Mani i Roig, whose vulgarity was as depressing as his piety was unassailable. The piety, it seems, counted most for Gaudí; in this respect the ugly sculptures being put on the Sagrada Família by its present anti-genius, Josep Subirachs, are desolatingly true to the Gaudían spirit. Mani i Roig would have turned La Pedrera into little more than a convoluted base for a huge, and hugely bad, sculpture. Perhaps its origins in Gaudí’s imagination lay in another banal dominatrix of the skyline, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

  That this did not happen was one of the few good results that can be attributed to the frenzy of church burning and street violence known as the Setmana Tragica or Tragic Week, which broke out in Barcelona in 1909 and came close to devastating the city. It was sparked by workers’ resentment over a Spanish colonial war, which quickly devolved into a frenzy of anticlerical violence. This, a worse repeat of the Burning of the Convents in 1835, resulted in the destruction of some eighty churches, convents, and religious schools. Any building that declared itself to be Catholic was a potential target of popular wrath, and Milà sensibly figured that an apartment block with a giant Virgin Mary on its roof was unlikely to escape intact. So the commission, mercifully, never went ahead.

  By now Gaudí had only one job left, the Sagrada Família. He had to raise the money for it; more or less alone, he had to keep its momentum going without any secure employer (one has to remember that the thing was not and never had been an official Church project). It was the obsession of his last years. In the wake of the Tragic Week it also became Barcelona’s chief symbol of rebirth and transcendence for Gaudí’s friend, the poet Joan Maragall:

  Like a giant flower, a temple blossoms,

  amazing to be born here

  amid such a coarse and wicked people

  who laugh at it, blaspheme, brawl, vent their scorn

  against everything human and divine.

  Yet among misery, madness and smoke

  the temple (so precious!) rises and flourishes,

  waiting for the faithful who must come.

  The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family represented faith and obedience in purest form. At least, it was meant to. And so, by transference, did Gaudí, whom the Tragic Week turned into a legendary figure in his lifetime, a walking emblem of penitence and devotion.

  Lay associations had sprung up like mushrooms in Europe, and particularly in Spain, to propagate the cult of obedience to the infallible pope, Pius IX, who had infallibly defined his own infallibility as a dogma, binding on all the faithful under pain of mortal sin, and therefore, of condemnation to hell.

  The chief of these associations in Catalunya called itself the Josephines. They first met at Montserrat, the holy mountain of the Black Virgin, in 1866. They chose a reactionary quartet as honorary patrons, Pius IX, the future king Alfonso XIII, Queen María Cristina, and a soon-to-be-beatified Catalan priest named Antoni Claret. The actual, or managing, leader of the Josephines was a bookseller and amateur flutist named Josep Bocabella i Verdaguer (no relation to the great Catalan poet). Bocabella,
it seems, knew very little about architecture. At first the expiatory temple was assigned to a pious mediocrity named Villar, who did Gothic Revival designs. But Villar resigned the next year, 1883, and in 1884 the Josephines found another architect: Antoni Gaudí. Why he was selected remains something of a mystery. He had built very little, and none of his major works, at that time, existed. There is a persistent story, probably too good to be true, that Gaudí got the job because he had such clear, ice blue eyes. One of Bocabella’s religious visions had been that the Sagrada Família would be designed by a true Aryan, a man with blue eyes.

  Whatever the case, Gaudí had a completely free hand from the moment the Josephines hired him. But no architect can live on the proceeds of a single building, unless he is designing something like the Getty Center, which the Sagrada Família was not. Especially this is so if the building is a church sponsored by a near-penniless organization. Hence the aura of saintly poverty in which Gaudí’s name is still enveloped. In the latter years of his life, the old man used literally to beg for funds, knocking on the doors of the wealthy in Sarrià and along the Passeig de Gràcia. No doubt the sight of his close-cropped white poll and shabby black suit struck fear into the bones families of the city. “Fets aquest sacrifici,” he would demand. “Make this sacrifice.” “Oh no, Señor Gaudí,” the target would protest, fishing out a couple of duros, “Really it’s no sacrifice at all, believe me.” “Then make it a sacrifice,” the implacable old man would insist. “Sometimes a gift is not a sacrifice. Sometimes it is nothing but vanity. Be sure.”