Barcelona (13 page)

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.”

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.