I have a new love in my life, and it is a buncha dumb rocks that got built into buildings by Antoni Gaudí. After the jump: photos and ramblings about this remarkable, on-of-a-kind dude!
Sagrada Familia, down the block from my AirBnB and still under construction 100 years after it began...
I knew that Gaudí was one of the major draws to Barcelona - any time you have an adjective drawn from your name, you're probably worth paying some attention to - but as with most things in the city, I sort of half-knew and half-shrugged about it. I was struck by his major work - still incomplete - as I came off the Metro stop to my AirBnB late the night that I arrived. Sagrada Familia, about 130 years in the making and still at least a decade to go, is a sprawling and busy and ardent piece of architecture. Even from the outside, the facade is dense with figuration and muscular verticality. I'd make my way in later in the trip, but first I'd visit Casa Batlló and Parc Guell...
Casa Batlló from the street
One of the more remarkable things about Gaudi's work is getting to see what happens when an architect is given the time and money to attend to quite literally every detail: staircase banisters to ventilation openings, they're all touched by his aquatic/sinewy/romantic-vision-of-nature vision
FOR INSTANCE: This is what a staircase can look like if you really decide to care about how you design your staircase. Swoon.
The view from a mid-level terrace. Gaudi's also huge on mosaic work, especially as it allows him to do more in the curved lines that he likes to play with.
I have an overhead lamp in my apartment but it does not look as cool as this. Stupid non-Gaudi lamp.
The view onto the street from these living rooms is remarkable, but what I especially love is how the light changes over the course of the day as it hits various parts of the stained glass. He uses this incredibly well in Sagrada Familia.
The view up the atrium; Gaudi adjusted scale of the ornamentation so it would look the same from multiple vantage points, and adjusted the opacity and tinting of various windows so that the light would feel similar all the way up and down. He was a smart cat.
I mean, this is how Gaudi did chimneys. How can you not love that? (Or how can you not love him framing a cathedral in between smokestacks?)
Gaudi's other major central house was closed for renovatios when I visited, but I'm told that it has full-on dragon sculptures on top; he likes him those curving lines. Also note the cross: Gaudi was super devout, to the extent that he quit another design project (almost near its completion) when his patron told him he didn't want a sculpture of the Virgin Mary on his rooftop.
Parc Guell:
LANDSCAPING. Gaudi draws a ton of his inspiration from nature - it's why he hates straight lines, and why his colors are so vibrant and varied - and it's kind of gorgeous to see what he does in terms of landscaping the existing nature. This project was designed as a kind of private development, until not enough people bought in and it became a public park. Now major sections of it are cordoned off for paying customers (mostly because it was so overrun) and it's a bit of a hybrid public-space/paid tourist site.
The candyland-looking paid section of Parc Guell. Look at those crazy rooflines! What a cool spot.
The main steps of Parc Guell. I just love the wild imagination and joy of design here.
I got back to Sagrada Familia on my penultimate day in Barcelona, and went inside. This isn't a small thing - all of Gaudi's buildings have steep (€20+) entrance fees - but given how much detail he lavished on the interior of these places, I have to say I didn't regret a single visit. When I get back to Barcelona (someday!) I'm hoping to catch a few more of his places, as well as doing more Dali exploration (he has an amazing museum outside of town that I didn't make it to this trip).
Sagrada Familia is ecstatic; I don't know how else to describe it. Soaring vertical lines, a forest-like canopy bathed in light whose color changes as the sun moves across the stained glass panels, it's one of the more inspiring physical spaces I've ever occupied. In part this is also, I think, because it's of a scale and ambition that we just don't have any more - when you spend time in Notre Dame you're floored by the fact that multiple generations of builders and architects worked on the cathedral knowing they would not live to see it finished, and Sagrada Familia is very much on its way to the same thing. The building is scheduled to be finished in 2026, for the centenary of Gaudi's death, but... even if we don't see a global financial crisis again, that's a rather optimistic estimate. I would love to return when it's completed... or maybe even before then. Here, some photos to close out this account of Barcelona, a city that completely swept me off my feet.
The Nativity facade. This is Gaudí in all his glory (minus the color), wild ornamentation that coheres into a glorious whole. It's really kind of outrageous that his name became the pejorative adjective "gaudy," because his work feels tremendously grounded to me. Busy, ornate, stuffed-to-the-gills... but beautiful and weighty and mindful all the same.
It's incredibly hard to get a sense of the building's scale. This is one of many attempts to do it with a panoramic shot but... bleh!
One of the many panels of stained glass.
Again just a very faint attempt to capture the raw heaven-reaching pull of the architecture.
Any Gaudí building, but especially the Sagrada Familia, it's a good idea to look up - to look for all the details he's packed into the place.
The Nave, with its tree-trunk columns.
Services these days take place in the more-Gothic-seeming crypt, leaving the cathedral itself open to visitors.
Okay, if there's one detail that's probably over the top it's this umbrella crucifix sculpture. But in context, in the light and the airiness of the space... it just feels of a piece with the whole.
Again just a hint (I think this comes through more clearly in the video) of the wash of colored light with which the sun bathes the space. It's an incredibly calming, lifting space.
The Lord's Prayer in Catalan. Many other languages underneath.
Jesus Gracies - I love the linguistic focus of all the doors to the space.
The Crucifixion Facade. Controversially, this facade's design was taken up by a twentieth-century architect whose style completely differs from Gaudi's - but that was apparently part of Gaudi's vision, to have future details given his level of attention but molded to other architect's visions. And really, if you want to apply a kind of Soviet Realism blocky form of figuration to any narrative, the crucifixion is not a bad place to go.
One last glimpse from the feet of the building, next to the school Gaudi designed (which you can see early in the video). Oh man I cannot wait to see what this thing looks like when finished.
This weekend I hope to have one more post up on a few folk I met along the way on this trip, and then maybe things will be quiet around here until my spring break travels (London and Paris! Closing out what's likely to be my last window of luxurious "school break" scheduling for a couple of years by revisiting the great staples). Or maybe I'll blather about other things! There is literally no way to know what is going to happen. Til then: keep being kind to people and looking out for the people who need it!
I loved Barcelona, gang. So much. More than I expected to - I hadn't actually known what to expect, beyond my friend Jenny, who's been there for a decade, and some good food. Did some requisite research before the trip, of course, but it wasn't as easy to conceive this one as some of the other travels. Well. The city knocked me out. After the jump: Barcelona sans Gaudi....
Barcelona from Montjuïc. Swell beyond reckoning.
I'm calling this Barcelona sans Gaudi because I want to cover him in a separate post and video. His architecture took me completely by surprised and rocked me back onto my heels in a massive way, so... more on that later this week. In the meantime... OTHER THINGS IN BARCELONA! (With a little Gaudi, at least in the video, because frankly he's inescapable.)
Barcelona felt to me like a sunnier, more temperate, and in many ways friendlier Paris. It has a lot in common with that other great world city: gothic neighborhoods with crooked, cobbled streets and laundry strung across narrow alleyways giving way to broad paved avenues on the Haussmann model. A human-scaled city with imperial-scaled slashes cut through it.
Peering around the corners
And then the big stuff...
While I spent a good deal of time working on dissertation translations and a few funding applications, I managed to sneak out and run around the city a few times. Gaudi was my huge takeaway, but there was a lot to love across the whole place. La Rambla, the pedestrian thoroughfare leading down to the port, is as touristy as you'd expect but also delightful and shaded and full of energy - you don't want to stop along the street to get paella but it's absolutely worth meandering to people-watch, architecture-gaze, and to visit La Boqueria, the city's main food market (go early when it's still serving the local trade). This part of town is also great for window-shopping... some majorly stylish shops, for menswear as much as anything else, including one of the most beautiful shoe stores I've ever been inside of (Carmina). It's also worth wandering the Gothic Quarter and Born neighborhoods, armed with no guidebook or information (though it's obviously more enlightening to wander with somebody who knows what's what).
Fishtowne at Boqueria
Sometimes you want a whiskey drink at a candy shop turned cocktail bar
I spent one morning at a cooking class near La Boqueria, a thoroughly delightful encounter with an Australian couple on their holiday and a tenth-generation Catalan chef; wandered some Gaudi buildings and spaces; and caught up with my friend Jenny, who is just as delightful as when we last saw each other, years and years ago. It continues to do my heart an unbelievable amount of good to reconnect with folk who've known me for a piece!
The beach. Too cold for a swim but man oh man is it great to have the water there.
Canon atop Montjuïc!
Canopies, light spilling in, the old cathedral of the city
I ate ridiculously well for outrageously low prices, skittered around town until I started to get an intuitive feel for the city, and generally found the whole enterprise to be welcoming in the extreme. It's awful nice if you can go there with a bit of Catalan (more so than Spanish, even), but it's very much the kind of international city where everybody will make do with English - and where you'll find it magical how much Spanish you can sort of understand. That may be due to having a bit of French and Italian (which Catalan and Spanish obviously keep in touch with, rootswise) but it's also just a nice reminder that you can dive in without being Fully Prepared and still manage to hack it in an unfamiliar context. Filed away for the future...
A Modernisme hospital near my AirBnB. All these sites are steeply priced - a combo, I think, of post-austerity VAT rates and an economy that knows it needs to get what it can from foreign tourists with a steep local unemployment rate. Worth every penny on the Gaudi sites, but it did keep me out of a few other corners that grabbed my attention like this one did...
Next up: GAUDI. The stunning brain-changer of the trip. A preview:
Casa Batlló at night - dig those undulating lines, the Venetian carnival mask balconies, the color (less visible here than in daylight)... The wild mind of Gaudi at work, pals n kittens.
Back with a Barcelona post tonight or tomorrow I think, but first... The Women's March, NYC.
The view of Second Ave, about a block away from the start of the march (officially) with blocks upon blocks to the north and west feeding in.
I decided to make a quick weekend trek down to New York, where I had friends participating in the rally and march on Saturday. It was pretty stunning and inspiring. We arrived shortly before the rally proper was to begin, by which time NYPD was directing people to newly-blocked-off streets for overflow capacity. It took almost two hours to get down the one block between us and the start of the march proper, and when we got there it was clear why: overflow streets had been packed as far as you could see in both directions, funneling a massive group of people into the official march route (from 47th and 1st to 57th and 5th). My friend Liz, who had arrived early enough to be at the rally itself, took almost three hours just to get to Grand Central. (Though perhaps her encounter with Helen Mirren, who admired her homemade sign, made that an easier wait.)
Setting Grand Central as a meeting place was, perhaps predictably, a popular idea. Even so, this jam-packed room was not as crowded as the day was going to get.
What made this all the more stunning was the steady stream of people exiting, who had spent a couple of hours in the throng and had to be off to the next thing. Even with a pretty consistent outflow of people, the streets were packed. It was a hugely positive event, with a lot of intersectional politics on display, signs and chants advocating for women's rights as well as Muslim rights, immigrant rights, LGBT rights... it was pretty beautiful.
No Compromise With Fascists is a pretty good motto to have at all times! But now is a fun and good time to make sure we hang on to it!
Obviously the question is what comes next. Drawing 400,000 people out to a protest in late January (a mercifully mild day, but still) is a good sign. I'm hopeful that when it comes to specific action -- pressuring GOP congressional representatives and senators to retain the ACA, shutting down anti-constitutional and anti-American projects like the proposed Muslim registry, the sale of National Parks land for plunder and profit, thorough investigations of Trump's flagrant ethical and legal violations -- this translates into phone calls, letters, sit-ins, and small acts of protest to continue to protect the vulnerable until a less-venal administration comes into office. Obviously I'd also like to see activist victories leading to midterm successes, even with a tremendously unfriendly map, but we'll have to see what happens.
The view as we approached... a corner that was still a block away from the start of the march.
It isn't enough, but it's a start. Here's hoping that the passions of Saturday, and the quiet horror of the moderates who used to have a home in the GOP, can get us through a chapter that threatens to be very dark indeed.
Glad to be an ACLU member
Weak Men Fear Strong Women
It's a little mission-drifty but hard to argue that this isn't a great sign.
Holy cats, this trip has flown! Only a day left here in Barcelona, which has rapidly lodged itself as a Most Beloved City in my heart, and as I start to pack and prep for my return to stateside routines, I wanted to catch up on what now feels like it happened eons ago, but in fact was... just last week, basically: SKYE. Video, photos, rambling after the jump!
Skye is one of those places that basically turns everybody into an amazing photographer just by virtue of being gorgeous to photograph. I can't get over what it felt like to be in the middle of this magic.
Well, this place was gorgeous. The name (from the ancient Norse for "Island of mists") gives a good sense of the place: misty, drizzly, lush, craggy - the varied terrain and perpetually changing weather reminds me of Shakespeare's line in which John of Gaunt calls England "this little world" (though surely neither man knew Skye, which is properly speaking in Scotland and etc. etc. etc.). It's a dense, lovely place, and even (especially?) going off-season, has a lot to offer.
Portree, my home for the week. Pretty little fishing village, clearly now mainly a tourist hub. Still, if you're there in January you're likely to find yourself among a tight-knit group of locals, which is: neat!
My time on Skye was pretty simple: the sun came up around 9 AM and went down around 3 PM, so I'd scoot out in the morning to explore a bit, come home by lunch, and write until dinner. Not a ton of time, but enough to get a few hikes in and to meet a few local folk, all of whom were delightful (more on strangers-on-the-road in a future post).
Hiiiiiking means you just come across dumb puddles with reflections of big dirt lumps in 'em. What a pain! We could have been playing video games instead!
After Skye, I drove down to Glasgow (by now totally comfortable with The Great Silver Monster, thankfully) and met my friend Sarah for a few days of relaxation and meandering, always delighted to hang with her and her boyfriend Mark. No major new discoveries beyond the fact that I'm a fan of Scotland, and I can spend basically the rest of my life exploring her charity shops, as they are glorious.
(Not Glasgow, of which I didn't really take new pictures. DON'T GET CONFUSED AND EXPECT THIS IN GLASGOW, TECHNICALLY IT IS A SIX HOUR DRIVE AWAY)
A quick hop through Bristol and I forged my way southward, fleeing the suddenly-horrible weather (I'd been lucky for over a week straight in terms of UK weather, so no complaining!) for the balmy, perfect climes of Barcelona. And oh my good golly did my heart ever swell up with love for this place. More on that... soon??
The same hike as the aforepictured pool shot. Scotland is DUMB.
Meep moop gleep gloop sun and crags and the ocean blah di blooooo
Did I go on a distillery tour? YOU'RE EXACTLY RIGHT I DID. Was it grIT WAS GREAT THANKS FOR ASKING. Definitely wander up the road to The Oyster Shed for a stupid-cheap lunch after your tasting. Yummo, as Robert Burns was wont to say.
The once-per-Scotland quota of selfies! This is shortly before turning back on a longer intended hike because a mudslide had left a terrifyingly cliff-sprawling ravine impassable, and this blog is nothing if not a paean to moderate cowardice in all things! But on the plus side, not falling to my death in a mudslide meant I got to check out Gaudi's work in Barcelona so ALL IS FORGIVEN.
