Barcelona

by Robert Hughes

  Such legends are much to the taste of Japanese tourists. No question, Gaudí’s most devoted fans are Japanese. They perceive Gaudí-san as a sort of Zen samurai, a heroic failure but a man of immeasurable and transcendent moral force.

  Droves of young Japanese, mainly architecture students, come to seek work on the Sagrada Família, as pious girls used to flock to Calcutta to wash ulcers and wind bandages for Mother Teresa. They hope, as one of them put it to me as he struggled with a fiberglass cast of a finial, to “absorb the holy message” of the architect. The irony, of course, is that nobody knows in detail what Gaudí’s conception was. His drawings were all lost or destroyed seventy years ago in the civil war, a point about which the Gaudíans incessantly lie. Since Gaudí’s death there has been no “real” Sagrada Família.

  There will never be another Gaudí. Nor is there at all likely to be another state of mind—not in Spain, anyway—resembling the ultraregionalist idea of the creative spirit that determined his work. And one can predict with some confidence that there will not soon be another figure like Gaudí’s spiritual adviser, the bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bagès, that strange ultranationalist Catholic, rotund, blind as a bat behind his moony pebble lenses, voluble as Ramón Llull and utterly incapable of doctrinal compromise.

  Barcelona has changed too much to produce such people and, despite the extreme conservatism of Pope John Paul II, so has the Catholic Church—one hopes. The present pope has made more saints in twenty-five years than any pope in history; it remains to be seen whether the conservative-nationalist elements in the Catalan clergy will prevail upon him to canonize Gaudí. The art of painting has a patron saint, an eminent one: the Apostle Luke, no less. Architecture has none. Perhaps it should have one, for then, as one Catalan delirious at the prospect observed, “It would be such a beautiful thing: Everyone will want to be an architect.” But then, perhaps not: The currency of sainthood is worn and shabby today, particularly since John Paul II, to the world’s amazement, recently canonized a Mexican, Juan Diego, for whose very existence—never mind personal sanctity—there is not one shred, jot, or tittle of evidence.

  Gaudí existed without a doubt, but it would be ridiculous to expect to see a “tradition” of architectural design stemming from him. Any new building related to Gaudí is automatically fated to look like mere imitation. Yet there is no doubt that Gaudí, by focusing modern attention specifically on Catalan architecture (rather than on music, painting, or poetry) made it the emblematic art form of Barcelona after his death. This distinction turned out to be of special importance in the late eighties when Barcelona was designated the host city for the 1992 Olympic Games.

  Olympiads generally come and go amid a lot of blather about how they help remake the host city, lift it into permanent world attention, and so on. It is rarely true. Architecturally, neither Melbourne nor Sydney was much better off for the 1956 and 2000 Olympic Games. The years 1976 and 1996 left nothing of memorable quality in Montreal or banal Atlanta.

  But the approach of the 1992 Olympiad was the cue for Barcelona to launch the biggest program of excavation and construction, rerouting and reconstruction, cleaning, restoration, and general urban rethinking the city had experienced in a hundred years, since the construction of the Eixample. It was an upheaval in the course of which the city government cunningly used national funds to pay for local changes that were desperately needed but would never normally have been financed by Madrid.

  It would take a longish book (and has produced dozens, mostly published in a spirit of relentless self-admiration by the Ajuntament) to detail and describe the changes in the city’s fabric this entailed. They run all the way from bylaw codes on the preservation of vintage art nouveau street lettering to the construction of huge arterial highways like the Ronda de Dalt above the city and the Ronda del Litoral along the coast. A stretch of waterfront several kilometers long, running north of the city, which was once a wilderness of rusting tracks and abandoned industrial equipment backing a sea strip nobody visited, has been cleaned out, razed, and turned into a handsome beach side: from dump to prime real estate in a single fiat.

  The old Barcelona grisa, gray Barcelona, had performed some truly execrable feats of reverse urbanism; the tract from the Ramblas to Barceloneta had been run-down and almost a slum in places, but now the city government, under the guidance of architect Oriol Bohigas, made it a promenade of elegance, the reenvisioned Moll de la Fusta. The only serious loss to the waterfront (and it is serious, indeed) has been the loss of the guinetes, those charming, rickety restaurants on stilts that wandered down the sand and into the sea, where one ate such sublime parilladas and paellas, bowls of sopa de mariscos and plates of those weird-looking, delicious percebes or gooseneck barnacles—plates which can be had in their full quality elsewhere in Barcelona today but which seemed to gain a special savor as the blue fumes of oil and the garlic-heavy scent of allioli mingled with the impure sea breezes off the port.

  Those in charge of new building in Barcelona did not feel confined to using only Catalan architects. Thus, the enormous new communications tower that shoots up some six hundred feet from the ridge of Collserola behind the city, a splendid and glittering affair of parabolic steel antennas sprouting from a core trunk of concrete, is the work of the British architect Norman Foster. The powerful dome of the stadium, Palau Sant Jordi, now Barcelona’s chief venue for indoor sports, was designed by the Japanese Arata Isozaki. These and other Olympic installations by foreigners have continued to serve the city very well.

  Less admirable were other projects. Pasqual Maragall, descendant of the great Catalan poet and then mayor of Barcelona, was not immune to star ranking, and he hoped to turn the new construction of his city into a serious architectural anthology. To their credit, he and his chief adviser, Oriol Bohigas, did not touch certain trendy architects of the eighties, such as Michael Graves or that Bernini of Disneyland, Robert A. M. Stern. But he was impressed, not unreasonably, by the fame of Richard Meier, who in 1984 had just corralled the very prestigious Pritzker Prize, the closest thing architecture has to a Nobel. Thus Meier was offered the commission to design a new Museu d’Art Contemporani (Museum of Contemporary Art), which would be built in the Raval—an old, dilapidated area behind the Ramblas and the Liceu—as an emblem of future renovation. Alas, Meier’s design was an uncharacteristic failure. Perhaps he found it hard to concentrate, with the enormous task of doing the Getty Center weighing on him. The collection of Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art was mediocre to begin with, and Meier’s building was unkind to the art, badly lit and spatially only barely coherent.

  The worst error of commissioning, however, was the redo of the Palau Nacional atop Montjuïc, home of Barcelona’s incomparable collection of Romanesque frescoes. It was done by the extremely mannered Italian architect Gae Aulenti, rather more fashionable two decades ago than she is today, and critics—remembering what a rhetorical hash she had made of converting the enormous Musée d’Orsay in Paris—awaited its unveiling with some trepidation. They were not disappointed.

  I had a small pre-opening acquaintance with this flashy and overdetailed building, whose chief feature was a huge vaulted oval hall for grand occasions. This time there would be an awarding of cultural prizes, an idea which, not very surprisingly, would not occur in Atlanta or in Sydney when the next Olympiads came around. They were generous, about five million pesetas (fifty thousand dollars) each, and given to outstanding figures in such domains as visual arts, music, and literature. They would be given by the king, Juan Carlos, who was accompanied by his daughters, the elder known as the Infanta and the younger, due to her girth, unkindly nicknamed the Elefanta.

  But now a problem arose and it didn’t look like it was going away. In the course of stripping and redoing the interior of this late 1920s mammoth of a hall, Aulenti’s builders had left the windows open and dozens, scores of pigeons got in. There, nesting among the bulbous brackets—you could see the straw and twigs sticking out—and flut
tering invulnerably under the dome, they took up residence and would not be dislodged. The job had to be finished with the birds still inside.

  A week before prize day, on a visit to the Ajuntament, I came across Margarita Obiols, wringing her hands in despair. (Margarita’s moments of despair are rare and fleeting, but when they come upon her she looks and sounds like the great Judith Anderson as Medea.) What on Earth was the matter? “Coloms,” she said, those damn pigeons. They are going to shit on the king and the infantas, and we don’t know how to get rid of them before the ceremony.

  I thought of the Crystal Palace in London, that marvel of Victorian engineering, and how just before its opening in 1854 the same problem had arisen: It was infested with birds, which could not be shot without stray pellets breaking the glass panes. Famously, when Queen Victoria mentioned this problem to the elderly duke of Wellington, he had replied, “Sparrow hawks, Ma’am!” But neither sparrow hawks nor any other suitable raptor were to be found among the bird-fancying societies of Barcelona.

  We then settled for a second plan, not as good. With a couple of marksmen (I wanted Olympic grade, but we had to settle for ordinary bird-hunting journalists like myself), one would go up into the structure of the dome, inching along the catwalks and ladders, and thus get close enough to the pigeons’ roosts to let fly with low-powered air guns, whose pellets, if we missed, would not chip the curlicues of painted plaster. After much scrambling, with our hearts in our mouths (at least, I know mine was) we reached our vantage points high in the dome and settled down, covered in dust and pigeon dung, to knock off the birds. They proved quite easy to hit but amazingly difficult to kill. Pigeons are tougher than you think and, with such weak air guns, you had to score a head shot. After a whole morning the three of us had accounted, if I remember aright, for no more than ten gray bundles of feathers, which spiraled far down to the limestone floor and were promptly scooped up by the workmen below, who took them home, presumably for supper. They must have been hoping for a larger bag.

  Tired of this inadequate sport and sneezing violently, we at last called it a day and started back down, leaving the pigeon population of Palau Nacional more or less intact. We had to scramble out through a door which gave onto the outside rim of the dome, high in the sky. A terrible chattering roar and a police helicopter came hovering into view round the flank of the dome, its open door crowded with black-uniformed security men who were themselves bristling with automatic weapons. What they saw, I realized with fore-boding, was not a trio of dust-caked journalists with silly .177 popguns. Not at all. It would be three Basque terrorists, getting set to murder the king of Spain and his family.

  Somehow, much later, we talked our way out of that predicament, but it was a close call. At the ceremony, no Catalan pigeons had the cheek to fly over the royal dais, so the day was saved. One of the papers, reporting the speech of thanks I had to make to the king in Spanish and then in Catalan on behalf of the prizewinners in the Cultural Olympiad, remarked that I resembled “a shaven Hemingway.” The writer cannot have been referring to my prose style, and I cannot believe he meant an allusion to my wretchedly meager powers as a Great White Hunter.

  THE WORLD OF GAUDÍ AND TORRAS I BAGÈS IS NOW irretrievably gone and so is the Catalunya they prized. What took it off the map? What disposed of the old Catalan nationalism?

  In a word, migration. Up to 1920 or so, Spaniards tended not to move around much within their peninsula. An Andalusian would stay in Andalusia, a Galician in Galicia. What changed this regional loyalty was the development of some areas that offered more and better work than others. Catalunya, being so industrialized, was dramatically changed by this. During the twentieth century it has been constantly altered by waves of immigration. Barcelona has the largest Catalan population of any Spanish city, of course, and most of these people descend from the massive internal migration Catalunya underwent during the last half of the nineteenth century, when people came flooding in from rural areas, attracted by industrial work. Spain’s first industrial proletariat was thus essentially Catalan.

  But then in the 1920s, and later during the industrial boom of the 1950s and ’60s, hundreds of thousands of other kinds of Spaniards came flooding into Barcelona from Galicia, Murcia, Aragon, Estremadura, and Andalusia. At first they settled in the Raval, that run-down place of poverty and racial mixture behind the Ramblas. They gobbled up existing villages on the fringe of Barcelona, like Santa Coloma de Gramenet. They spilled into outlying areas where nobody, a few years before, had even fancied the city could spread to: Torrent Gornal, Verdum, Bellvitge, La Guineneta, places no tourist had seen or heard of. They filled Barcelona with smells and colors it had not known before, not all of them benign in their implications. On the most obvious level immigration, especially from the Middle East just across the salt water, brought an explosion of street crime and a nightmare of hard drugs, which Catalans invariably blamed on the hated xarnegos, the dirty wog foreigners.

  Barcelona is a very big city, about four million people, and getting bigger every day. With more Catalans than any other place in Spain it also has the second largest Andalusian population; and so on, down the lines of difference. (The Andalusian Feria de Abril in Barcelona brings together hundreds of thousands of north-living southerners to drink fino and play flamenco.)

  The social effects of this migratory influx are completely irreversible. Barcelona, a century ago a stiffly exclusive place when it came to perceptions of nationality and culture, is now almost totally and, much of the time, proudly multicultural—more so, perhaps, than any Spanish city except Madrid. There is no blood and race definition of who is and isn’t a Catalan. The mere fact of being Catalan confers no rights or privileges in Catalunya. The legal definition is very broad: “The political condition of Catalan” belongs to all Spanish citizens with “administrative residence” in Catalunya. This would have seemed absurdly permissive to Gaudí.

  No question, Catalans are still extremely proud of being Catalan. But the signatures of difference have shifted, slowly but inevitably.

  For instance, Torras i Bagès and many other conservatives a hundred years ago thought it verged on impropriety for a Catalan to show extreme enthusiasm for bullfighting. The corrida, they supposed, was an “African,” unchristian spectacle fit only for moros. Instead, the good Catalan should reserve his highest enthusiasm for the local castellers. The castell is a human pyramid, formed by muscular xiquets—local lads from one’s village or home district—standing on one another’s shoulders in a series of rings, its apex created by a young, light-bodied boy who manages to scramble up the structure and stand, swaying triumphantly, on top. It was always one of the most popular folk-sport, team-effort demonstrations of equilibrium and cooperation in Spanish life, a proof of the seny traditionally prized as a Catalan virtue.

  Catalunya still has its castellers, and delightful they are to see in competition, but the great binding sport of the place is neither castells nor, obviously, bullfighting (though the city has two bullrings) but something it shares with all the rest of Spain—an unquenchable passion for fútbol. The Fútbol Club Barcelona (Barcelona Football Club) was founded in 1899 by a Swiss enthusiast and in the following century it ramified with barely credible fecundity, becoming the most extreme and powerful example of Barcelona’s mania for clubs and every sort of collective activity, from folk song to pigeon fancying.

  The Barcelona Football Club—Barça for short—has its home field in the Camp Nou, “new field,” a sports stadium that can easily hold 100,000, built just off the great artery of the Diagonal in 1957. Its home colors are scarlet and navy blue, a heraldry which by now probably equals the traditional quatres barres, the four red bars of Wilfred the Hairy’s gore imprinted by Louis the Pious’s fingers on their yellow ground, in the city’s affections. Its war cry, in all its commendable simplicity, is Barça! Barça! Barçaaaaa!, and its club song, written in 1974, is close to being a national anthem, but one for a nation of immigrants rather than valley dweller
s:

  Who cares where we come from,

  North or south,

  We all agree, we all agree,

  One flag makes us brothers.

  With reason, Catalans think of Barcelona as the most interesting city in Spain. But very few of them imagine they get some peculiar moral advantage by living there. Barcelona has now become a genuinely multicultural city, without the woozy overtones (or the odor of mediocrity, slight but unmistakable) that the word “multicultural” has acquired in the United States. It does not find all its cultural traits equally to its taste. The city is even capable of being a bit embarrassed about some of them, as well it might be, particularly now that Barcelona is being promoted by eager American journalists as the newest, hottest thing in European destinations. But no matter. The city may not transcend its faults, but it does outweigh them. Perhaps it always has. “You are boastful and treacherous and vulgar,” wrote Joan Maragall, in the last lines of his “Ode to Barcelona.” But then, the cry of infatuated loyalty. “Barcelona! And with your sins, ours, ours! Our Barcelona, the great enchantress!” There is still ample truth in this.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2003, DORIS HELD HER FIRST ONE-PERSON show. It consisted of botanical watercolors, a subject and medium in which she excels. It was held in an old and respected gallery, the Sala Pares, in the casc antic or medieval part of Barcelona, a few minutes’ walk from the Ajuntament where we had been married two Christmases, a little more than a year, before.