Sunday, June 16, 2013

My New Favorite Architect: Gaudí


Ah, Barcelona, where to start?  We did so much in 5 days.  I think I will cluster posts by artist/topic instead of a timeline.  Welcome to the Gaudí post!

I have discovered that I love Gaudí.  I would recommend that if you are in Spain, save the Sagrada Família until after you've seen the rest of Gaudí's work.  Everything else pales in comparison.  Thus, the order of the Gaudí buildings below is not the order in which we viewed them.

We started with the block of Discord, which includes buildings by Gaudí and others.  We did not go inside any of these.  Here's Gaudí's Casa Batlló:
And Casa Batlló among other buildings:
Then, there's Casa Milà, a wavy apartment building
with a crazy rooftop:
The windows you see below the railing in the foreground are in one of the building's two courtyards.

One of the courtyards has a stairwell that is quite pretty as well:
Then, there's Parc Güell, which includes a great view of the city,
mosaics,
crazy structures:

and great benches:
And finally, there's the Sagrada Familia.  I'm less impressed with the outside, although it looks pretty at night.  Perhaps it's all the scaffolding.  When it's finished, it will be have a tower much taller than the church is now.
But the inside is breath-taking:

Ceiling of the cathedral
with lots of incredibly colorful stained glass windows:
There's a museum as well, and Paul was impressed with a technique for devising the correct shape for arches by using hanging strings and weights:
Hands down, my favorite church in all of Europe so far.  I would love to see it when it's finished, which is projected to be in about 2030.

4 comments:

  1. Haha, it is gaudy, which is where that term comes from, I hear. I thought I wouldn't like it much but ended up loving it. It also helps that it is so very different from everything else we've seeing in Europe.

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  2. Check out the last picture in this article! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(1975_film)

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