Barcelona 14 May 2016

Architecture

For me, one of the most important things about travel is being transported into a new perspective. I hint at that on the days before we leave home: how my experience of my familiar is changed, elevated. Making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.

Barcelona is a city aware of its architecture. It has given me some of my most poignant and powerful insights into the inter-relationship between dwelling and dweller. While I am staggered by the magnificence of a Sagrada Familia, what always appeals most is the little touches: the closet doors, the use of space that would otherwise be wasted, the lavishing of makers' time on details which make the living easier or more pleasurable. So many of these details either go unnoticed in everyday life, or are utterly absent from what we might call "common residences."

By chance, I have been reading Michael Pollan's first book, a lovely treatise that approaches building with the same verve and newbie appreciation that he has later become famous for in his food writing. A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder is, as a Pollan afficianado might expect, a very heady, hands-on approach to the builder's art, thickened with dozens of juicy quotes from others who have thought about building down through the ages. To me, his reflections are especially poignant (and I venture to guess to my daughter Sienna) because his initiation into those arts parallels ours in so many particulars. Never having held a hammer "professionally" we have, nevertheless, built houses together, and undertaken the even more daunting task of fixing houses. Just before this trip began, Sienna and I, with abundant help from Rochelle, whose house it is, have been reinventing (renovating would be the usual word, but our work has gone so much farther!) the kitchen of the house Sienna lives in. (Sienna sent along some pictures of our modest architectural efforts, to be seen below.)

And so now you understand a little bit more about why I stand in such awe of the care, detail, and beauty of Casa Batlló.

(At right: post card images by Pere Vivas, Triangle Postals.)

On yesterday's bus ride, we encountered "Barcelona's three proudest towers," -- I'm guessing the word "proud" is being used in the builder's sense, some piece of construction that sticks out beyond its mates. The three atrocities that follow (tell us what you really think, Michael) are, to my eye, carbuncles on the otherwise beautiful skin of a city whose architectural heritage, through the 20th Century, was gracious and sensitive. At left, the tallest (and ugliest), fittingly designed by committee, an upthrust middle finger to the Barcelonan body politic right on the shore of their prettiest beach. 

This so-called "High-tech architecture" puts the structure outside the building, a sort of exoskeleton, so that the curtain walls are all hung inside. Pollan fulminates at some length about how the idea of glass walls, supposedly making the distinction between inside and outside go away, actually have exactly the opposite effect, of distancing, mirroring, closing off ...and, above all, exposing.

Like most post-modern architecture, this building has no relationship to its place. It's like some great rectilinear pterodactyl took a monster steel crap right on Barcelona's front porch.

Next up, the singularly uninteresting but obtrusive Mapfre Tower, another extended middle finger (or pterodactyl poop) right next door. A second image occurs from a little bit up the street: two long fangs.

This "mixed use" building (meaning there are offices as well as residences in it) unarguably gives its residents great views ...but it has the same sensitivity to site one sometimes sees in the west, where some nouveaux riche asshole builds his 20,000 square foot ranch house on top of a obtrusively visible local hill. He has a great view, but for everyone else: not so much. This kind of thinking makes me so appreciate the consciousness that went on in Caspar when we purchased our headlands and dedicated it to parkland.

One of the architect's truisms that Pollan likes to cite is that a building is at its best the day before its tenants move in. This strange notion that the architect's "art" is sculptural, monolithic, enormous, meant to last forever, placing the seal of the architect's ego on the skyline in perpetuity, somehow subordinates the purpose of building: to make a space for humans to live and work. Looking at this building, and the one before, it's too easy to imagine that inside as well as out, it is made up of abrupt corners, unfriendly edges, and, once again, loads and loads of uncomfortable spaces. One goes on to imagine that the residents and workers have done everything they can do to soften, humanize, and otherwise obscure the antagonistic intentions of the architects.

The compelling puzzle for me, seeing this atrocity, is: How do the officials of this most humane of cities justify this kind of obtrusive experimentation right in the eye of their beholders, when their forefathers approved and financed Sagrada Familia and lived in houses like Batlló and Pedrara? In a city where one whole neighborhood, the Eixample, was built with a modest height limit so there were "no tall poppies," what failed? And, as these horrid turds age badly, as they inevitably will in the hostile marine environment, what will their successors think of those officials, who so clearly, publicly, and memorably, fumbled the ball?

Just one more: the Agbar Tower. This one, the first of its kind in Barcelona, almost makes me laugh. The work of a French architect ... I don't know about you, but this makes me think of one enormous faceted erect schlong. Can you imagine working in this thing? "Where do you work?" "Oh, I work right below the glans." We see this kind of thing in movies ... no, not that kind of movies, I mean futuristic outer space settlement movies. We're supposed to be thinking "beyond humanity" or so the post modern architectural establishment tell us -- this won the prize for best skyscraper in 2006 -- but to me, this, and its brother structures in Paris and London, are obscenities.

And that brings me back around to the values that inform the work of Gaudi and, to a much more primitive degree, our modest renovations in Caspar. Rather than making egotistical statements about who we are and how important our vision is, we try to make every detail responsive to the folks who will actually be living with it, touching it: drawers that open and close smoothly, spaces that are full, but not crowded, with utility and convenience, and that are pleasing to the eye primarily because one looks on them and immediately perceives their purpose and function.

And that, dear readers, if you have persisted all the way through my harangue to here, is why I loved Casa Batlló so much, and will bring home from it details and ideas that will enrich my work and the lives of those who touch it. Can you even begin to imagine anyone similarly benefiting from one of these horrors?

Our modest work, with finishing touches still to come (after the trip): the new bay window and window above the new sink unit (at left), the new counter and shelf unit (middle), and our first bricklaying effort (right). Compared to Gaudi ...well, it doesn't. We have a way to go.