The Ryndex

We took our next breakfast out in the Eixemple, just north of Plaça Catalunya near our hotel. Ambitious urban planners formed the Eixemple from a perfect grid of rectilinear roads, sliced through by one or two diagonal avenues. Each block is a perfect, beveled square.

Our goal today was the Passeig di Gràcias, the modernista route showing off Barcelona’s famous art nouveau and art deco architecture. The sidewalks along this route are taken from Gaudí’s famous hexagonal tiles that show life from the ocean. Gaudí designed the delicate and gracious street lamps, integrating a flowing bench into each one. And the most famous of the Gaudí apartments (Casa Battló, our first stop) costs an butt-reaming 16.5€ to visit. Bring your own lube, or do as we did and skip the visit entirely.

I would really have liked to have seen it, and I’m sure I would have adored the building. I’ve always been a huge art nouveau fan, and Gaudí is the art nouveau-iest. But come on, there has to be a limit to the price-to-experience ratio. Thus, skipped.

Instead, we went to a little tapas bar for coffee, and walked around looking at some of the less-famous works. There was the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, which had a floating wire sculpture above it.

We did go to La Pedrera, another of Gaudí’s buildings (and a very reasonable 8€). We started on the roof, which is open with a great view over the city. There are two large, round holes going down into the apartment complex for light, and the roof has waves of gentle stair cases going up and down and around them. The chimneys and stairwells are all large sculptures, geometric, but fluid. There were arcs to walk through and/or hit your head on.

The attic floor was designed to provide a buffer of air, ventilating the upper apartments in the summer and insulating in the winter. There’ll an exposition space one day, but for the moment there were just a few models and plans for the building. There are hundreds of brick arches on this floor — like other art nouveau designers, Gaudí drew his inspiration from nature, and many of his arches were hyperbolic catenaries. A rope of uniform weight (or Christmas garland) will naturally take this shape when hung between two points — flip it upside down and you have an optimally self-supporting arch. The neat thing about hyperbolic catenaries is that they’re made of an exponential function added to its own reflection! This means they’re the best arches ever and the most strong and godzilla couldn’t ever stomp one flat, even if he was as big as the moon! Hooray hyperbolic catenaries!

They renovated and refurnished the floor just below the attic to how it would have been in modernism’s heyday. The rooms were all gracefully curved, but functional. I love art nouveau things; it always keeps on boiling down to shelves and teapots that were grown instead of manufactured. The gift shop was pretty nifty.

We finished off the day down at the other end of La Rambla, by the water, going up a tiny elevator to the top of the monument to Columbus (pointing off into the distance). We walked for a bit along the harbour, and enjoyed the sunset.

We ate on a terrace that night, and had a big pitcher of good, non-vile sangria. Duckie ordered Canada Cake off the menu, without having any idea what it was going to be — it turned out to be ice cream cake.

Despite not getting any decent sleep (and I had even found ear plugs in my bag), we managed to take the metro out to Park Güell (pronounced “whay”, I have just learned). Designed by Gaudí for his biggest patron, Colonel Güell, it’s mostly known for the astonishingly beautiful mosaic work done by his colleague, Josep Maria Jujol. The terrace undulates along the top with crowded tile benches, and an extremely famous tiled dragon that everybody takes unpleasantly crowded photographs of.

You know, I really like Gaudí and his stuff. I do. He was one of my top draws for Barcelona. But I can probably save a lot of bandwidth by throwing a bunch of adjectives here and letting you insert them repeatedly in my descriptions: undulating, organic, sinuous, stylized, graceful, hyperbolic, fluid, probably closeted, sweeping, serpentine, and colourful.

We saw his house and bought the combo ticket to visit it and the Sagrada Familia (9€). Lots of Gaudí-related drawings and explanations, etc, insert adjectives here and have your toes stepped on by too many people.

We ate that night at 8pm, which is very early in Spain — only the tourists eat that early! The restaurant was called Los Toreros, and was decorated in coloured tile and bull-fighting posters. We ate very well, but we particularly liked the manzana liqueur served as a digestif.

We dropped our bags off at the central bus station and spent our last afternoon at Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família — the ambitious church (but not a cathedral) designed and overseen by Gaudí for much of his life. The Spanish have a saying: Like the Sagrada Familia, you can know when you start, but you can’t know when you’ll finish… Gaudí himself had another saying: My client isn’t in a hurry.

The church was started in the late nineteenth century. The design called for twelve towers (representing the Apostles) and one giant dome with a huge walk-up cross that serves as a spotlight and viewing platform. They haven’t started the dome yet, but most of the rest of the structure is in place. It’s taken far longer than projected, and some of the older bits are requiring restoration before the new bits can be finished.

There’s a museum in the basement, with plans, plaster models in all sizes and preliminary sculptures. Gaudí wasn’t making it up as he went along — he researched and carefully planned all the different aspects of the church, from the pillars reminiscent of plant stalks to the interlocking sunbursts in the ceiling. There’s a workshop dedicated to restoring his scale models to ensure that his vision is accurately constructed.

There was a little cinema showing the stages and techniques of construction. One woman made a phone call during the film (Martha!?). She made a phone call in a cinema during the film. A cinema, inside a museum, inside a church. You have to be a completely oblivious yokel to top that Martha (but we met that yokel in Rome, just wait.)

We went to the top of the towers for a view over the Eixemple, then walked around the church under construction a bit more. It’s already a stunning achievement. It’s going to be a world class monument when it’s finished… The posters said they expect it to be done in 2015, but the only Barcelonan I know scoffed at the idea.

Okay, that caps the trip to Barcelona. We took the bus to Girona, and flew to Ciampino. Because our flight arrived late at night, we planned ahead and reserved a chauffeur for the drive into Rome. Oh, the luxury!