Barcelona (12 page)

Gaudí never ceased to draw on, and from, nature. Each paving block of Passeig de Gràcia features a starfish and an octopus, originally designed for the Casa Batlló. Turtles and tortoises support the columns of the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Família, which also has thirty different species of stone plants copied from the vegetation of Catalunya and the Holy Land. Mushrooms become domes, or columns with capitals. The columns of the Güell Crypt are a grove of brick trunks, sending out branches—the ribbed vaults—that lace into one another.

Gaudí knew and never forgot country building in stone, clay, and timber—materials (he said, with a sovereign disregard for the leisure hours of common folk, which he expected them to sacrifice willingly for the greater glory of God and perhaps of Gaudí, too) that “can be gathered by the peasants themselves in their spare time between their labors.” Thus the rough stone walls of terraces in the Baix Camp became the “rustic” colonnades of the Güell Park. In the latter years of his life, when making the figures for the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Família, he made literal transcriptions from nature by chloroforming birds and even a donkey so as to cast them in plaster. Sometimes this effigy-making was of a rather more gruesome kind: Since nobody, and certainly not the bristly and childless patriarch Gaudí, could induce a live baby to be still, when he needed infants for his scene of the “Slaughter of the Innocents” on the Nativity facade he got permission from the nuns in the old Hospital de la Sant Creu to cast the corpses of stillborn babies in plaster. There exists an old photo of one of Gaudí's studios, looking like a charnel house or perhaps the dreadful ogre's cave of Polyphemus in
The Odyssey,
with plaster limbs and bodies hanging on every wall.

But what mattered most to Gaudí was twofold. First, the forms and structural principles that could be deduced from inanimate matter, such as plants. And second, his own artisan background.

This ancestry mattered immensely to the architect. He thought of himself, not as a theoretician, but as a man of his hands. He said, no doubt truthfully, that he learned about complex curvatures and membrane structures by watching his father beat iron and copper sheets, making up the forms without drawing them first, producing the miracle of volume and enclosure from the banality of flatness. It is a fact that tells you almost all you need to know about why Gaudí was not a “modern” architect, in the Mies-Gropius-Le Corbusier sense of “modernity.” Unlike such people, unlike even his Catalan contemporaries Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch, he thought in terms of manual not conceptual space. Others were ruled by the grid; Gaudí didn't give beans for it. His mature work cannot even be imagined adequately from flat drawings. Its surfaces twist and wiggle. The space flares, solemnly inflates, then collapses again. Gaudí did not like to draw; drawing did not preserve enough information about the complex volumes and hollows he carried in his head. He much preferred to make models, from wood, paper, clay, or cut turnips.

Gaudí's instinctive preference for the haptic over the conceptual worked against him when he entered the school of architecture, housed in the Llotja in Barcelona, where he would study from 1873 to 1877. Because abstractions bored him and he did not think easily in terms of orthographic projection (T-square architecture: plan, elevation, section), he did poorly as a student—not the first time that a genius at school has seemed not to be one. His teachers were far more interested in transmitting the basics of Greco-Roman planning and ornament than in teaching what most interested Gaudí, rural vernacular building (“architecture without architects”) and Catalan medievalism. Both fused, or so he came to believe, in a unique sensibility which was nationalist at root and could only be expressed in Catalunya. “Our strength and superiority lies in the balance of feeling and logic,” he wrote, “whereas the Nordic races become obsessive and smother feeling. And those of the South, blinded by the excess of color, abandon reason and produce monsters.” This, though untrue, reveals not only Gaudí's regionalist mind-set but also, in its last five words, his acquaintance with Goya's “Caprichos.”

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 technology, 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.