From the issue dated June 7, 1996
NOTES FROM ACADEME
Celebrating Barcelona's Genius of Architecture
By Peter Monaghan
Barcelona -- A roaring black dragon, saber-toothed and taloned, confronts the architects, academics, and other visitors who approach the office of Juan Bassegoda Nonell. But when Mr. Bassegoda appears, coifed and tweedy, he looks more like a country squire than the keeper of so fearsome a beast.
He swings open a large iron gate, of which the imposing animal forms the upper two-thirds. Familiar to most Barcelonans, it is an early work by the astonishing Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi i Cornet, who lived from 1852 to 1926. Mr. Bassegoda has tamed the monster better than he has his three dogs. They yap as he draws the gate closed and leads the way into the center he directs, the Catedra Gaudi.
Here Mr. Bassegoda, a professor of architecture at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona, has spent much of his career documenting Gaudi's work, which is the emblem of the Catalonian capital. Mr. Bassegoda is, by the consensus of Gaudiphiles, the authority on Catalonia's vaunted son. He holds the university's prestigious Gaudi Chair. He has written 12 books and scores of articles about Gaudi. As his father was, he is a prominent restorer of monuments, including the city's celebrated cathedral and several Gaudi buildings.
"Gaudi is really a virus," he says. "He enters into the body and is impossible to abandon."
The Gaudi center occupies the converted stables of the Guell Pavilions, which Gaudi designed in the 1880s and which formerly were at the gatehouse of a plush country estate. The building and adjoining porter's lodge, of molded plaster, brick, and stone, are curious, typically Gaudian structures -- somehow harmonious muddles of geometric brickwork, grille designs, and skewed extrusions, all relieved by gleaming blue and green ceramic tiling. The roofs are bordered with stone finials and capped with Arab-inspired cupolas and tangle-topped iron lanterns. Clearly, they are the product of a most particular imagination.
How, one wonders, did anyone get away with creating this?
Simple, explains Mr. Bassegoda: Throughout his career, the idiosyncratic Gaudi enjoyed the patronage of Eusebi Guell, a wealthy textile manufacturer who, like Gaudi, was a champion of Catalanism. Amid a clutter of papers and illustrations, Mr. Bassegoda launches into a paean that he clearly has delivered often.
"Gaudi's architecture is out of time," he says. "Its style doesn't depend on each moment, but on nature, which is constant. He observed nature and discovered -- not really discovered, because it is absolutely known -- that nature produces decorative and structural forms, extraordinary forms, using a geometry which is not the geometry of the architects."
Architecture, Mr. Bassegoda explains, has always depended on Euclidean geometry -- the cube, the prism, the pyramid. But Gaudi observed in such natural forms as trees and bones the prevalence of "beautiful curved surfaces with ugly names, such as hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids, helicoids, and conoids. He transferred this geometry to construction."
The converted stables feature a series of parabolic vaults partitioned by arches, at whose apexes shallow, paralleloid windows admit crisp spring light.
Mr. Bassegoda learned to appreciate such designs from his father, who also taught architecture at the Polytechnic. In fact, his family tree is decked four generations back with architects. After Barcelona's Roman walls came down in 1854, the family played a prominent role in a great urban expansion beyond the tangle of dank, medieval lanes. The Bassegoda family apartment was at the core of the new district, the Eixample -- Catalan for expansion. Their building, constructed by a grand-uncle, was just off the grand, plane-tree-lined Passeig de Gracia.
From there, they could gaze half a block away to one of Barcelona's many Gaudi creations, Casa Batllo. The residence is a stunning composition of organic shapes -- boughs, ferns, seed pods -- set beside window bays that resemble eye sockets framed by femur bones. Colored tiles speckle its facade. A multicolored roof line twists like a serpent. The building is Gaudi's version of St. George's slaying of the dragon, an edifying legend evident in much Catalonia art.
As Robert Hughes suggests in his book Barcelona, Gaudi's work is by turns mystical, penitential, and wildly elated. To see all that, you must go three miles east of Mr. Bassegoda's office, past the scores of elegant apartment buildings in the Eixample, to the mammoth cathedral known as the Sagrada Familia.
On arrival, one is hard pressed to take in the sheer improbability of Gaudi's uncompleted masterwork. Its spires -- eight of a projected 12, representing the Apostles -- rise to 300 feet and are capped with elaborate forms resembling bishops' mitres -- or fireworks. If ever completed, a central nave will tower an astounding 200 feet higher.
The church is a pauper's Bible. Allusive sculptures and friezes cover the walls and spires. Thirty species of plants appear in carvings and ceramic decorations. Turtles, snails, and other animals continue to the top of the spires, where only Gaudi's God sees them.
In 1936, when Mr. Bassegoda was 6, anarchist-inspired hooligans attacked the building in an event that foreshadowed the Spanish Civil War. The mob destroyed Gaudi's models and plans for the cathedral.
Since then, Gaudi's successors have struggled to figure out what he intended. His models, which he varied as he went, were themselves rare constructions. For the Sagrada Familia, he used a system now called polyfunicular modeling. With shot weights and string he built an upside-down model, in which tensions on the strings mimicked, inversely, the forces of compression that the structure would be under. This permitted him to plan a staggering, unprecedented feat: By depending on an intricate web of compression to keep in place the millions of tons of masonry, he would build the whole structure without buttresses.
Gaudi was able to see only portions of his creation built. In 1926, after 43 years of working on the building, he was run over by a tram. He died three days later.
Now work on the cathedral is proceeding, amid lingering, politicized debate. Many architects and art critics decry the new work, in particular the decision by Jordi Bonet, the chief architect, to use reinforced concrete. In Barcelona, Mr. Hughes damns the new building as "a huge simulacrum, an inert copy of a nonexistent original."
Mr. Bassegoda, intent, perhaps, not to affront those who control the building, defends the additions: "Gaudi said the Sagrada Familia was a work of generations. He knew that after him new techniques would be perfected, and other architects could use them."
For Mr. Bassegoda, the real issue is expiation. The building's full name, translated, is Holy Family Church of the Atonement. Gaudi, a devout Catholic, intended it, Mr. Hughes wrote, as "an ecstatically repressive building that would atone for the sins of modernism and the excesses of democracy."
Anti-democratic was not all Gaudi was. He was also autocratic and misogynistic. Nonetheless, Mr. Bassegoda celebrates Gaudi's single-minded work on the Sagrada Familia. He is, in fact, one of several Catalan intellectuals who have petitioned the Vatican to beatify "i gran Gaudi."
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
