UNGODLY

No modern city is as strongly identified with a single structure as Barcelona. Basílica de la Sagrada Família is its unofficial emblem, and its architect, Antoni Gaudí, its unofficial patron saint. Images of the famously unfinished church are splashed across every kind of merchandise, from artisinal t-shirts and silk scarves to cell phone batteries and one-Euro chocolate bars. A visit is the central experience on the tourist route, like a visit to Ground Zero is in New York. Tickets to the tower observatory cost 29 Euro, the equivalent of 29 city subway rides. Yet the city’s mission to complete construction of the building, whose foundations were laid over a century ago, doesn’t seem crassly commercial. It seems daft, and slightly heroic.

When we visited, on a weekday morning, the church’s front facade was draped with nets and scaffolding, and its interior rang with the whine of drills and saws. The front and side facades of the building, which were built first, under Gaudí’s direct supervision, have weathered majestically. Their stone is darkened and roughened, and the richness and detail of the statuary feels Medieval. But those parts of the facade more recently constructed, although to Gaudí’s design, look more like computer renderings. The blocks here are smooth and taut, with little fine-grained embellishment. No doubt Gaudí, when alive, worked closely with masons so that each block was carved to his specifications before it was raised. There’s no way to know, or match, his vision.

The church was consecrated in 2010, and there are rows of folding chairs cordoned off in the nave for parishioners. It’s hard to imagine a less serene, private, or spiritual space than the church on a weekday morning. There are throngs of tourists, guides and church employees roaming about, and an orgy of selfie-taking. Sunlight streams through the stained glass windows, splashing the floor with cartoon-bright patches of red, green and yellow. The columns and capitals, newly finished, have a kooky kinetic energy, but little authority or mystery. This place simply doesn’t feel like a church; it feels like a playground.

March 21, 2016 by Nalina Moses

HOUSING WORKS

Was Antoni Gaudí a sculptor or an architect, and does it really matter? After seeing the insides of his two most famous residential works, Casa Batlló and Casa Milla, I say sculptor. This master was trained as an architect and worked as an architect, with all the corresponding woes, battling the city over permits and clients over payments. And he invented form as an architect, through drawings and models. But there is a serious disjunction in his work, and in these two buildings especially, between their outsides and insides – between their expressive, convulsive, Modernisme exteriors, and their deeply conventional interiors.

At both Milla and Batlló, staid nineteenth-century-style apartments are fitted behind radical twentieth-century facades. The facades are undulating, pulsating, encrusted with twisting railings and psychedelic tilework, and topped with menacing, monstrous chimneys. At Milla the stone blocks facing each story have been carved to resemble waves, with black metal balcony grilles floating in front like sheets of sea weed. At Batlló the parlor floor balconies are framed with femur-like columns and braces, and the windows glazed with puddles of plasma-colored glass. The life of both building lies on their facades, which look out from opposite sides onto Paysage de Gracia, the city’s most elegant street, just two blocks apart. They show bold faces to the public.

Inside both buildings, within their apartments, the plaster walls and ceilings are gracefully rounded and carved. But the layouts are constrained by rectangular lots, and by the needs of bourgeois clients. I’m not sure what Gaudí, or anyone else, could have done to transform a turn-of-the-century master bedroom, bathroom or maid’s room. He designed signature tiles and furniture for the owners’ apartments. But in vintage photographs these rooms are overstuffed with upholstered furniture and knickknacks, and have the dry, fussy feeling of Victorian homes. They remain, on the inside, pre-modern. How extraordinary that Gaudí’s patrons were willing to risk appearances like this. They presented a revolutionary facade to Barcelona high society, while carrying on, inside, in the most predictable way.

March 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

LESS IS LESS

For anyone with any interest in architecture, visiting Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, when in the city, is an obligation. One finds there, in a faithful reproduction of the original 1929 structure, what one expects: the travertine slab floor, the serene reflecting pools, the dramatically cantilevering roof, the floor-to ceiling window panes, the floating marble partition, the precious cruciform columns, and, presiding over it all, the life-size female statue in the back corner, who, with twisted torso and outstretched arms, seems to be practicing an arty minimalist dance.

But the experience of the building is thin. The first time I visited, two summers ago, the sun blasted the interior, giving the space a dreamy organic glow. I wandered through, dazzled, and walked away, satisfied that I had encountered a building I’d known before, for decades, only through textbooks. The second time I visited, this winter, the clouds hung low and gave the interior a cool blue cast. The travertine floor, I saw, was streaked with years of grime. The leather chair cushions were dull. The richly veined sepia marble and bright red velvet curtains seemed, in combination, gauche. And the chrome column covers, with a fattened profile and exposed flathead screws along each side, were clumsily executed.

My friend, an architect, remarked, “This is a building that travels best in black and white photographs.” Photography draws out the long perspectival lines of the walls and the roof, flattening them into elegant lines, wiry starburst compositions that Mies studied meticulously in collages before construction. Photographs take the weight out of the materials, softening the figuring in the stone, dematerializing the low plaster ceiling, and rendering the glass invisible. It brushes away the dull physicality of the building, and also the heavy-handedness of the design.

The Pavilion was designed as a space to receive the King and Queen of Spain during the 1929 Exposition. It’s less a proper building than a dressed-up shed, and its main spaces have no lights, electricity, security, plumbing and weatherproofing. This program frees the design, so the plan can resolve itself with mathematical precision, like a difficult proof solved by a very clever student. The Pavilion’s open plan falls easily into abstraction. And the building itself is pretty in an immediate, uncomplicated way. It’s forms are reduced, purged of historical references, which is how it became an icon of High Modernism. But for someone deeply interested in design and construction, the Pavilion remains just that, a magnificent symbol. All of its less leaves one wanting more of what one finds in buildings one loves: ornament and grit, tension and complexity.

March 06, 2016 by Nalina Moses