Covering the New Celestial Jerusalem

Yours truly (the tall guy) and Jordi Fauli, head architect of the Sagrada Familia, with one of the lighting fixtures

 In this month's Architectural Record, I return to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, this time to take a look at the lighting:

"The level of detail that the design team has found for these lighting elements amid the fragments of Gaudí's studio is astounding, though they haven't hesitated to use the most advanced technical means to realize them."

 It was fun to put critical aloofness aside and share with the architects and lighting designers their delight in technical invention, and to groove in their weirdness, with mystical references to the "Celestial Jerusalem" and other ocult symbology that didn't make it into the text.

Thankfully, no one seemed to remember my critical article on the temple in The Architectural Review from 2012  (see blog entry here). Or they were nice enough not to mention it. We all gave each other a sporting chance.

As a special treat, head architect Jordi Faulí invited me back after the temple had closed, to see how the lighting worked at night. As we stood in the middle of the nave, Jordi's former boss and former head architect Jordi Bonet, who I had interviewed in 2012 for the Review, emerged from the shadows, an ancient, gnomic figure among gnomes, and captivated our little group with stories of Catalan greatness, rendered, with great deference to his foreign guest, in the hated Castillian tongue. The one story I sort of recall was about Catalan anti-Imperialist imperialism -- a noble Catalan general fending off a Russian incursion into California, in the days when Alaska was still Russian and California still Spanish, and converting the Indians instead of killing them off. Then Madrid spoiled it all somehow. Or whatever.

Another stellar moment was when Faulí described for me the exterior lighting for the towers, which he is building now (also didn't make the cut). Here's the section from my notes:

 JF: central tower w/a 4-armed cross, Jesus Cristo, 172 meters. Gaudi didn't want to rise above height Montjuic hill. "out of respect for the Creation"
4 towers of Evangelists around it: 135 m ea.
Apse: Virgin: 130 m
Towers of transepts: 100 m
JF: "un prodigio" all supported by interior columns of nave
JF: from 4-armed cross spot lights in each arm. "The light of Cristo to the pueblo. And this light reaches the people, how? The light doesn't pass to the street directly, but through the towers of the facades that represent the Apostles and Bishops. And from these Evangelists the Cross is lit. Because they are the ones who transmit the Word of Jesus. The Word of Cristo illumniates the world. Illuminates and is illuminated."

To give you an idea of what he's talking about, the tallest tower in Barcelona pushes 150 meters or so, if I'm not mistaken. All were designed deferring to the up-and-coming central tower of Gaudí, according to my new friends.

Tweety Bird lights on the columns Aren't they adorable? Photo by DC, up in the rafters

La Sagrada Familia
Lighting Gaudí's eccentric, posthumous masterpiece
Architectural Record, May 2014, p 166 - 169

Strange Times for the COAC

Strange times for the COAC - the architects' professional association in Barcelona, the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya. Its headquarters, located on a prominent plaza facing the Barcelona Cathedral, is now festooned with a large, publicly sponsored advertisement, entirely covering its facade, that seems to be promoting, in the guise of a historic anniversary, Catalan independence.

The marquee below the poster is by Picasso, another in-your-face gesture, this one from the Franco years, when the artist was an official no-no.

And the COAC's exhibit space, apparently too valuable to be dedicated to architecture exhibits these days, has been turned into an ersatz gift shop. 'All very tastefully, done,' I suppose they imagine. Why don't they just lease it to Foot Locker?

Photos by DC, March 14, 2014

Born to Run

I couldn't resist republishing this blog from Exabruptos, by my colleague-in-arms, John Sandwich:



Readers of Spanish, please don't miss Jacinto Antón's virtual tour of the new museum of Catalan hurt feelings in El País this Sunday, Born to Si, Si.

During the restoration of the Born, a19th century market, archeologists discovered the remains of an entire neighborhood demolished by Bourbon conquerors in the early 18th century, in reprisal for Barcelona's siding with the wrong monarchy in the War of Succession.

The project for a library in the building was cancelled, and now it has been opened as the Born Centro Cultural, "a sort of theme park glorifying that Barcelona razed by Phillip V's Bourbon troops in 1714," in the words of a more uncritical report published in El País on September 10th.

Antón explains:
"The Catalan sovereignty movement finally has a modern tool capable of transmitting its version of history and stir emotions in a mass audience...

"The fundamental experience pursued in the Born CC does not truly belong to the field of historic knowledge, but rather to that of emoción identitaria, the identification with a people and a destiny, with its projection into the future ('the Catalan people maintained the memory of their liberty forever after'). And everything with a modern, impeccable aesthetic and design, equal to that of any European museum."

September 11, 2014 will be the third centennial of this conquest, just in time for the referendum on Catalan independence that the government of Arturo Más is attempting to organize, as a diversion from his disastrous economic policy.

You know the old routine, things are going bad, find someone to blame.

Makes me think back on the emotionally manipulative exhibit displays at Washington's Holocaust Museum, opened in the 1990s. There the aim of moral education is theoretically more universal, but as my friend David Cohn wrote at the time, shouldn't we have more faith in reasonable argument, also on moral grounds? Emotional communication is for another sphere -- but exactly which one?

Meanwhile the grim historic facts about the repression of Catalan identity on the part of centralizing forces from Madrid are quite solid. Archeologists recovered 300 cannon balls from the ruins under the Born, for example; 60 are in the exhibition.

A few more pearls:
"El Born CC, que tiene parte de Yad Vashem —el museo de los mártires y el heroísmo del Holocausto, en Jerusalén— y parte de parque temático, con un puntito de Nou Camp (en los dioramas y reconstrucciones históricas las casacas de las tropas que defendieron la ciudad son mayoritariamente azul y grana y las de los atacantes borbónicos, blancas)..."

"...por todas partes en el Born CC el visitante encuentra alusiones a lo feliz, fantástica y próspera (incluso con helados) que era la vida hasta la Guerra de Sucesión —como si los catalanes fueran un pueblo de industriosos hobbits sobre los que se cernía la sombra del Mordor borbónico y su “barbarie absolutista— y mensajes más o menos subliminales tipo '1714-2014 Vivir libre', 'Feliz Tricentenario', 'Reborn'...."