See Barcelona through the eyes of Gaudí

Barcelona

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JIM AUCHMUTEY/jauchmutey@ajc.com

Legendary architect Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, despite its odd look and rather ominous nickname, House of Bones, was built as an apartment house.

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JIM AUCHMUTEY/jauchmutey@ajc.com

His serpentine bench at Park Güell draws young musicians.

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JIM AUCHMUTEY/jauchmutey@ajc.com

Ironwork cascades like vegetation from terraces of Gaudí’s amorphous apartment building, Casa Milà.

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Anna, our tour guide, started by pointing out the obvious: The man who designed the edifice before us was very “orrrri-gi-nal.” In her chirpy Spanish accent, the “g” came out hard, as if she were saying “diagonal.” But we understood.

The bizarre originality of Antoni Gaudí’s Temple of the Holy Family — La Sagrada Familia — awed us. The unfinished church is perhaps the world’s most famous construction site. We marveled at its exotic splendor: columns branching up to ceilings like trees, towers soaring to the heavens like dripping candlesticks, spires bursting into clusters of fruit like something from Carmen Miranda’s headdress.

We hadn’t experienced such a strange built environment since we visited Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens in northwest Georgia two decades ago. Clearly, we were in the presence of another man of visions.

Barcelona, as the 1992 Summer Olympics demonstrated, is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Part of its charm is the setting: sun-bleached mountains rising from the blue Mediterranean. But much of the city’s allure is man-made and conveyed in the creations of a singular soul. Perhaps no place on Earth is as identified with one architect as Barcelona is with Antoni Gaudí.

“He is Barcelona,” Woody Allen told an interviewer, explaining the backdrop for his latest movie, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

When my wife, Pam, and I visited for the first time late last year, we didn’t intend to spend half our waking hours touring buildings. But we did. We couldn’t help it; the surreal architecture lured us in like a plate of tapas. From our first look, we knew it would be the theme of our trip: We had to get us some Gaudí.

Mr. Natural

Neither of us knew much about the architect beyond a poster of La Sagrada Familia a friend of ours has. I always thought the lavishly embellished church bordered on kitsch. After we booked our trip, I actually looked up the word “gaudy,” wondering if its etymology has anything to do with the patron saint of Barcelona. It doesn’t, though some would find Webster’s definition — “ostentatiously ornamented” — appropriate.

We learned about the real man at the first of four Gaudí shrines we visited: Casa Milà, a seven-floor apartment building opened in 1912. From afar, it looks like a sand-colored cliff with caves gouged into the face. As we walked closer, we could see that the cliff was actually an undulating façade with balconies of ornamental ironwork that clung to the side like vines.

The natural allusions were intentional. Gaudí was born in the mid-1800s in the Catalonian countryside and was fascinated by the shapes, colors and structures of nature. He was unorthodox from the beginning. When he graduated from the Barcelona School of Architecture, the director is said to have announced: “Gentlemen, we are here today either in the presence of a genius or a madman.”

Compared with some of Gaudí’s works, Casa Milà is rather subdued. Only on the roof do the school director’s words seem apt. The building is topped by a confusion of terraces and steps that wander through stands of vents and chimneys sculpted into alien shapes.

Some of them look fluid and friendly, like soft-serve ice cream cones. Others are vaguely menacing. The chimney pots, mustered in ranks of three and four, seem to wear pointed helmets with dark slitted openings.

“It looks like the Martians invaded,” Pam said.

Dragons and serpents

We saw a more fanciful side of Gaudí the next day when we set out with a picnic lunch for Park Güell, his fantasyland on a hill overlooking central Barcelona.

We entered through a gate flanked by two houses that were inspired by the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. One is a witch’s house with a hallucinogenic mushroom on top. The other is a children’s house capped by a double cross. Each is encrusted with trencadis — shards of colorful tile — making them glitter like rhinestone jackets.

Park Güell started as a gated community, a real estate development named for Gaudí’s principal patron, industrialist Eusebi Güell. Few houses were ever built, but the layout and trippy design survived when the property was turned into a municipal park during the 1920s. It has become one of the most popular gathering places in Barcelona.

Art historians classify Gaudí as the exemplar of Spanish modernisme, a break from classicism that stressed voluptuous curves and ample ornamentation. It went by a more familiar name in France: art nouveau. Regarded as something of a stylistic cul-de-sac, it enjoyed a brief heyday in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then was surpassed by more radical breaks with the past.

Whatever his genre is called, Gaudí is flat-out fun in Park Güell. At the center of the park is a grand staircase that surrounds a bright mosaic-tiled dragon — the unofficial mascot of Barcelona — spouting water from its mouth. We joined the line of visitors waiting to pose with the happy creature.

Then we climbed the stairs to the park’s main attraction, a square overlooking the city. It’s ringed by the damnedest bench you’ve ever seen: a long, sinuous concrete thing encrusted with broken ceramics, curving in and out like the tail of a sea serpent.

We sat there for a long time people-watching. On one section of the bench, we saw a couple smooching, young men playing guitar and bongos, and two older gents snoozing in the afternoon sun. It was the perfect Barcelona postcard.

House of Bones

Our third stop on the Gaudí trail was Casa Batlló, an apartment building he designed in 1904 in a style that can only be called proto-psychedelic.

The seven-story structure is faced with columns and balconies that look like skulls, hip bones and thigh bones — hence the nickname, House of Bones. For a moment, I thought I was looking at an old Grateful Dead album cover.

Inside, the allusions go in completely different directions. In the center of the apartment house is an atrium that feels bright, blue and bubbly, like an aquarium. I had another musical flashback from the ’60s: the Beatles’ “Octopus’s Garden.”

On the roof, there was another outburst of weirdly shaped vents and chimneys. The Martian invaders were there again, guarding a turret that resembled a mushroom with a four-armed cross on top.

But the most striking feature was a portion of the roof line, which rose and fell like a dragon tail studded with jelly bean-colored ceramic pots. The roof itself was clad in iridescent tiles of pink and purple that looked like fish scales. I thought of the beach.

“This roof,” I told my wife, “would make a hell of a miniature golf course.”

Hideous and holy

La Sagrada Familia is as iconic to Barcelona as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. And like the Eiffel Tower, it has always stirred strong reactions.

George Orwell, who saw an early version when he was writing about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, pronounced the temple “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.” On the other hand, art critic Robert Hughes admired its outlandishness, calling it “an enormous penitential church apparently made of melted candle wax and chicken guts.” We didn’t notice any entrails, but some of the towers and parts of the façades do indeed look molten.

La Sagrada Familia invites metaphors because the reality overwhelms the senses. Most churches have a single spire. This one has more than a dozen — it will have 18 when it’s finished — and every inch seems to be festooned with symbols and sculptures of Christianity.

We walked around the periphery to take the temple’s measure, craning our necks at the endless allegorical details. Then we went inside and waited for almost an hour to catch an elevator that took us up in one of the towers, where we got another perspective on the intricacies.

Gaudí worked on the church for more than 40 years, and it captures the essential nature of the man better than any of his buildings. Looking at his colorful designs, it’s easy to imagine the architect as a passionate Spanish artist, a Picasso in stone. In fact, he was a pious Catholic vegetarian whose devotion to the temple turned him into something of a monastic figure late in life. Gaudí became so obsessed with the project that he eventually turned down all other jobs and moved into a hut on the grounds. His faithfulness was such that there’s a movement afoot to nominate him for sainthood.

One day in 1926, preoccupied with his work as always, Gaudí stepped in front of a streetcar and was struck and killed. He was buried in a crypt beneath the temple.

More than 80 years later, work continues on his masterpiece. Construction cranes rise beside the towers, scaffolding obscures some of the interiors, and hard-hatted men congregate where pews and altars will be.

The church hopes to finish construction by the centennial of Gaudí’s death in 2026. That may be optimistic, considering that the central tower isn’t very far along.

Not that Gaudí would be concerned by a missed deadline. He knew his hymn of praise would take many decades to compose. “My client,” the architect once said, “is in no hurry.”

IF YOU GO

About Barcelona: The capital of the Spanish region of Catalonia is one of the most fashionable cities in Europe. With a population of 4 million, it’s smaller than metro Atlanta but feels more urbane. Barcelona came into its own during the 1992 Summer Olympics, when its Mediterranean waterfront was cleaned up and redeveloped.

Getting there: Delta flies direct from Atlanta. Other airlines have connections. Round-trip fares start around $850.

Going for Gaudí The eccentric architecture of Antoni Gaudí is one of Barcelona’s main attractions. Ten of his works are open for touring, including Park Güell, Casa Milà, Casa Batlló and the building that is synonymous with the city, the Temple of the La Sagrada Familia (www.sagradafamilia.org).

Information: www.barcelonaturisme.com.