To start, let me review Gaudí’s unique architectural designs that we mentioned in the last post (Barcelona X).  Gaudí incorporated many geometrical forms in his designs, particularly hyperbolas (more accurately, their 3-D rotation that forms hyperboloids, illustrated in pictures below).  Hyperboloids like that shown in the last picture below

essentially form the Sagrada’s ceiling.  In addition, for Gaudí, religion and nature – God’s creations – were intertwined, and he used a number of nature’s designs in his own architectural solutions.  For instance, in nature, the cellular elements in the trunks of trees are often joined together and oriented not linearly but spiraling upward, giving the trunk and branches greater strength.  Gaudí uniquely took this approach, allowing his very tall columns to be more slender and producing a more harmonious effect.  Besides his columns branching tree-like to support their load, the column surfaces are the result of intersections of oppositely turning geometric forms.  The simplest example is that of a

square base twisting clockwise and a similar one twisting counter-clockwise, evolving into an octagon as the column rises, then a sixteen-sided form, and eventually to a circle. Depending on the position of the column in the basilica and the weight load, the columns start with different geometrical cross sections; the taller the column, the more points in the polygon at the base.  The tree-like columns, as well as having a structural function, reflect Gaudí’s idea that the inside of the temple should be like a heaven-reaching forest that invites prayer.

With that preparation, let me introduce you to the interior.  To the left is the floor plan of the Sagrada Família with the Nativity entrance on the right side.  Following my visit to the Sagrada interior, I was very much surprised by this floor plan.  Usually medieval cathedrals are cross-shaped with long and narrow naves and transepts.  The Sagrada also incorporates a cross shape, but it looks positively short and squat, with truncated nave.  The dwarf cathedral!  However, inside the Sagrada, Gaudí’s “forest of columns” absolutely hides that wide and short nave; the columns define a long and narrow space very much like the Medieval cathedral.  Besides, as you’ll see, with everything else that’s happening, the nave’s length is the last thing that’ll capture your attention!

Well, one last observation before we go inside.  When I look at the Sagrada Família, what I mostly see is this huge towering stone structure, and secondarily a bunch of small decorating windows, as shown in the first two pictures below.  However, a  closer

inspection suggests there are in fact a fair number of those small windows – and many more windows to which we previously paid no attention, such as those we saw in the previous Barcelona X post lurking behind the statues of Christ crowning Mary in the Nativity facade, or those hiding in plain sight behind the singing angels, shown below.

So the Sagrada Família has more windows than you might think!  And you’ll see that in the interior.

Entering from the Nativity entrance, across the transept is the Passion facade entrance.

Isn’t that first picture awesome?  We’ll come back to those gorgeous branching columns; for now we’ll look overhead at the ceiling vaults over the transept, shown below.

That is a ceiling!  There are no straight lines, just smooth curves and jagged incised arms of intersecting hyperboloids.  The complex structure is somehow magically supported by the branching columns.  The pictures below continue the scan across the transept, looking

back now at the Nativity entrance.  Pictures of the entrance’s stained glass windows, and those off to the sides of the entrance, are shown below.

Turning to the left we face the choir, which soars upward, the leaning columns adding

perspective to the heavenly stretch.  Isn’t that first picture impressive??!

And now the nave.  Oh yeah.  If you remember from the floor plan, there is a central column-lined aisle bounded on each side by another column-lined aisle.  The central aisle is higher.  Below are two  pictures from the internet, the first taken from the rear of the nave looking toward the choir.  The wide-angle lens used in that first picture skews the

perspective on the right and left sides, but this picture does illustrate Gaudí’s “forest of columns”.  It’s a gorgeous interior!  The 2nd picture shows the incredible ceiling over the nave.  It’s stunning!  The hyperboloids on the left and right sides presumably represent the leafy canopy of the column “trees”.  Some see those hyperboloids as representing stylized sunflowers, a flower Gaudí loved and incorporated in a number of his architectural projects (in a subsequent post we’ll show you a Gaudí house that is sunflowers from one end to the other!).  Whatever those hyperboloids represent, the ceiling is just awesomely beautiful!

As exciting as those pictures of the nave are, they don’t capture it’s magic.  Did you notice the colors in the ceiling in that last picture above?  The ceilings in those side aisles are lower than that of the main aisle, and that color comes from light reflected upwards after passing through the lower stained glass windows.  Just a reflection?  What does that portend for direct viewing?  Let me show you the view you get looking down the first nave side aisle when entering from the Nativity entrance, first 2 pictures below.  The color that

is streaming in is stunning!  It’s natural lighting delivered by the nave’s lower stained glass windows, as illustrated by that last picture above.  Not to be outdone, the other (Passion) side aisle continues the color spectrum, green to red, as shown below.  It’s

breath-taking.  Wandering down the aisles is like being in a jewel box or a light show, as shown below.

The nave aisle windows causing this light show are shown in more detail below, first for the red side.  There are two levels of windows, as shown in the first picture.

Those last two windows you saw from the outside (at night) in the previous post, Barcelona X.  The nave windows on the blue side are shown below.

The windows with their patterns and colors are stunningly beautiful.  Gaudí planned for the graduated spectral tones of light inside the Sagrada Família to create an atmosphere conducive for introspection.  For me, it wasn’t introspection that I experienced but awe – and a child-like wonder at being transported to a fairy world.

Below is another look at the beautiful hyperboloid ceiling in the nave aisle, with its tree-like columns and flower/leaf canopy.  In keeping with Gaudí’s design of columns as trees, the bulge that supports the branching columns alludes to stubs from cut limbs.

The ceiling in the central aisle of the nave is higher and has a very different hyperboloid design.  It’s also much brighter.  How so?  Unlike the lower stained glass windows, the

upper windows use uncolored glass, as shown above, providing more light to the higher-ceiling “heavens”.  Below are views of this upper ceiling; the hyperboloids are gorgeous.

Notice the presence of small lights in the ceiling, looking like light bulbs.  They’re not.  To both lessen the load of the ceiling and bring yet more light into the building, Gaudí designed skylights in the roof (again based on hyperboloids).  He also added linear elements of gold and green glass and tiles to reflect the daylight inside.  It all adds up to spectacular.

There are many more amazing elements of beauty in this basilica, such as the spiral

staircases in the corners. Everywhere there are arresting perspectives and visual delights, as shown below.

I hope you are as impressed by the Sagrada Família – and by Gaudí – as we are.  Gaudí’s position in the history of architecture is that of a creative genius who, inspired by nature, developed a style of his own.  His methods continue to be considered revolutionary, a century after he devised them (!).  The Sagrada Família was and still is a constructional challenge: it is one of the largest testing grounds for construction methods in the world.  Describing Sagrada Família, art critic Rainer Zerbst said “it is probably impossible to find a church building anything like it in the entire history of art”.  Yep.

In earlier posts I hyped the heck out of this cathedral.  If you’re not blown away by the Sagrada Família and its interior, I can only attribute it to the inability of still pictures to capture it’s awesome, innovative, courageous beauty.  Perhaps it would help to look at a short video of the interior, such as the one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-17MPSCnnDU.  Still – we have to ask – is that the interior that one would wish for in a religious service?  Would you not be distracted by that interior?  Does it really promote introspection, as Gaudí wished?  We touched on the emotional relevance of religious interiors in a previous blog, when we visited Córdoba’s Mezquita with its unique juxtaposition of mosque and Roman Catholic church (Córdoba).  We think the Sagrada Família is a wondrous monument to the Christian religion, and a true milestone of human achievement with its daring vision and execution.  We’re just not sure about its ultimate role as a place of worship.

We leave Spain now, although we’ll return later for Spain’s Basque region.  Our next post will be from Amsterdam – and its great museums.

 

The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família – or simply La Sagrada Família (translation: Holy Family) – is a Roman Catholic church designed by Gaudí that, 130 years later, is still under construction.  As shown below, it’s big!  Although parallels with Gothic

cathedrals of the Middle Ages are obvious, there is one major difference; in today’s world, I can’t imagine another such church ever being built.  If things stay on schedule, it will have taken 144 years to reach completion.  That makes this basilica the Last-of-the-Mohicans special – and is it ever!  Gaudí’s grand masterpiece is structurally innovative, wildly creative, incredibly bold, and unmistakably organic in architecture and decor.  The interior is spectacular, and like nothing you have ever seen.  Literally.

Before we explore this masterpiece by Gaudí, let me give you some history (ah … actually a bunch of history).  Construction on the basilica started in 1882 with a Neo-gothic design by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano.  However, due to disagreements,

the architect resigned and Antoni Gaudí took over in 1883.  A few years later Gaudí proposed a more grand design, abandoning the Neo-gothic plan for something more monumental and innovative, both in structure and in construction.  It would be a large church with a Latin-cross floor plan and soaring towers, and be immensely symbolic both architecturally and sculpturally, conveying teachings of the Gospels and Christian Church.

In 1914 Gaudí decided to concentrate exclusively on Sagrada Família; he undertook no other major work in the later years of his life.  On a summer day in 1926, while taking his daily walk to church, he was struck by a passing tram and knocked unconscious.  Assumed to be a beggar due to a lack of identity documents and shabby clothing, he did not receive immediate aid.  Eventually transported to a hospital, he received rudimentary care.  He was finally recognized the next day but died 2 days later at the age of 73.  He had worked for 43 years on the temple.  “It is not a disappointment that I will not be able to finish the temple. I will grow old, but others will come after me. What must be always preserved is the spirit of the work; its life will depend on the generations that transmit this spirit and bring it to life.”  A. Gaudí.

After Gaudí’s death in 1926, the construction of Sagrada Família was continued by architects and craftsmen who had worked with him, following his plans and plaster models.  I think it worth spending a little time to understand how novel Gaudí’s design was (and continues to be).  In his desire to overcome defects he saw in Gothic structural systems, he developed a new architecture based on organic and geometric forms of nature to create balanced and self-supporting structures.  Nature often incorporates in its structures such geometrical forms as the ellipse, parabola and hyperbola, and Gaudí adapted these and – when using two together – their intersections to be integral structural forms of his architecture.  An example of Gaudí copying from nature is shown below, comparing the structure of a plant pollen grain to windows in the Sagrada.

Gaudí rarely drew detailed plans of his works, instead preferring to create them as 3-dimensional scale models, as illustrated below and as shown incorporated in the

Sagrada (Note: Isn’t that last picture, showing the interior, absolutely breathtaking??).  Some of Gaudi’s evolving models of La Sagrada are shown below.  They show an evolution from a neo-Gothic structure to a model based on the parabola to the final design using

hyperbolas.  The models are reconstructions, alas.  At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936), anarchists broke into La Sagrada, wrecked a crypt and chapel, and destroyed and burned Gaudí’s studio. His drawings did not survive, but the mobs left behind many broken pieces of his original models which were painstakingly restored.

Gaudí also used the catenary arch; a catenary is the curve that a string or chain assumes under its own weight when supported only at its ends.  Gravity gives it that shape.  Flip it upside down, and it’s a weight-bearing structure with only compression forces.  In Gaudí’s time it was used only in the construction of suspension bridges; Gaudí was the first to use it in common architecture.  He would attach a drawing of the building floor plan to a ceiling, from which he would attach strings (representing columns, arches, walls and vaults) with bags of birdshot (for the weight of small building parts).  He would then take a picture that, when inverted, showed the structure for columns and arches that he was looking for.  Using this technique, Gaudí arrived at the revolutionary idea of using inclined columns that subsequently branched out like trees.  The leaning columns better resist the perpendicular pressure that they experience, and the branches support a structure of intertwined hyperboloid vaults.   Space is divided into small, independent and self-supporting modules without needing the buttresses required with the neo-Gothic style.  Further, the hyperboloid vaults have an empty center, allowing natural light to enter, in contrast to Gothic vaults with their keystones that resulted in closed, dark cathedrals.  Where Gothic vaults have ribs, the hyperboloid design allows the intersection between vaults to have holes, which Gaudí employed to give the impression of a starry sky.  Further, Gaudí conceived the branching columns of the church to have not only a structural function but to represent a forest, a natural temple that invites prayer; and like sunlight filtering through leaves, to create a space of magical lighting conducive to intimacy and meditation.  Isn’t that picture on the left gorgeous?  Wait ’til you see the Gaudí interior!

One last architectural point.  To achieve greater stability and a slender and more harmonious effect, Gaudí designed all the branching columns to have a double-turn helicoidal shape (right turn and left turn) similar to those in the branches and trunks of

trees.  The base of each column has a cross-section that is a polygon or star which, as it twists to the right and left, transforms into a circle higher up.  Depending on the position of the column in the basilica and the weight load, the columns have different cross sections, as shown schematically in the last two pictures above.

OK, after talking about Gaudí and the bones of Sagrada Família, maybe now you want to actually see it?  And I want to show it!  But first let me give you the overview of this complex basilica.  The Sagrada Família could be used to give a crash course on the Catholic religion, given the wealth of Christian symbols that Gaudí placed on the facades.

First of all, just look at the model to the left, and be amazed.  That’s a church?  At this scale it almost looks like a Disney fairyland castle run amok.  However, up close, surrounded by the cathedral’s details, the structure is overwhelmingly, undeniably religious.

The basilica has three monumental entrances, each one representing one of the three crucial events of Christ’s existence: his birth (Nativity facade); his Passion, Death and Resurrection (facing us in this picture); and his present and future Glory (facing to the right in this picture). The Sagrada has 18 towers, each with a special significance.  The middle tower is dedicated to Jesus Christ; around it are four towers representing the Gospels.  The tower above the apse, crowned by a star, represents the Virgin Mary, while the remaining 12 towers – 4 over each entrance – represent the Apostles.  Christian symbols, as well as Modernista nods to nature, are present everywhere on and in the basilica, too numerous to mention but including the main symbols of the Old Testament.

We’ll start at the current entrance and the oldest facade, the Nativity, begun in 1892 (when the Sagrada is finished, this will be a side entrance).  This facade faces the rising sun, symbolic of the birth, life, and light of Jesus.  It’s decorated in a style I would call

“too busy”.  The facade’s decoration includes over 100 plant species and an equal number of animals (!).  It attempts to communicate and celebrate man’s journey from creation through the old testament, then Christ’s birth and youth, and at the highest niche, visible in the last two pictures above, Christ triumphantly crowning Mary.  Starting at the bottom of the Nativity facade – you might find it helpful to refer back to the right 2 pictures above – this facade has 3 separate entrances each nestled inside a grand parabola (or portico), each portico representing one of the theological virtues of Hope, Faith and Charity.  Two massive columns flanking the central portico rest either on a turtle or a tortoise, representing dominion over land and sea.  The central and largest portico, Charity, has fabulous bronze double doors inspired by nature, full of metal leaves, flowers and insects, as shown below; perhaps suggesting that you are about to enter Gaudí’s reverential forest (of columns) mentioned earlier.  Note that the statuary surrounding the doors (the Adoration

of the Magi and the Adoration of the Shepherds) practically includes you in it as you enter (details shown below).  The scene in the middle above the doorway celebrates Jesus’ birth and the “Sagrada Família” – the holy family of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus in the

manger.  Arrayed just above the Holy Family is a chorus of young angels with angel

musicians flanking them (and the star of Bethlehem atop a central pillar between the windows).  Above the angel choir is a depiction of the Annunciation, with the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the Son of God.  Finally, much higher than all of these decorations and at the apex of the Charity portico’s parabola is the beginning of a spire, the Tree of Life, which at its base opens out to form a large and commanding niche showing Jesus Christ crowning Mary as Queen of Heaven, as shown below.  Interestingly, Joseph is present in this Coronation scene – an

unusual detail.  The Tree of Life sweeps upward, pointing towards the heavens with many symbols of Christianity and with doves of peace nesting in its branches.  Among the Christian symbols is the pelican, based on an ancient legend that it will pierce its own breast with its beak to feed blood to its hungry babies, a symbol of Christ sacrificing himself for man.

Some details of the Nativity facade’s Hope and Faith portals are shown below.

There’s more to this side of the Sagrada Família than just that ornate Nativity entrance, as shown in the first picture below.  There’s a looooong extension to the left, with a very different architecture!  Here geometry won over ornate story telling; there’s still religious symbolism, but basically the windows are simply amazing, with each vertical level wonderfully different.  Windows on the first two levels, shown below, are relatively

conventional; the next level is simply awesome.  In the first picture below, there’s a lot going on – plant statuary on the triangular roofs, interesting spiral columns, alpha and omega symbols, statues of religious figures – but mostly there’s a fascinating array of

windows formed by the intersection of hyperbolic planes, as shown in the pictures above.  The window glass is planar, but the surrounding structures show all kinds of energetic angles!  Those angles remind me of the flying planes formed by ejecta when a water droplet falls onto flat water, shown in the last picture above.  For me, the window array is wonderfully exciting.

Windows at the highest level are equally fascinating and are also formed largely by the

intersection of hyperbolic planes.  They are so cool!  Look at the intersections at the bottom of those pictures where several windows converge!  Love it!

The side of the Sagrada Família to the right of the Nativity facade (shown obliquely in the first picture below) has no grand entrance and generally has a more conventional Gothic-like architecture; however, there are a lot of very interesting and unusual details, like the huge animals that can be seen slithering half-way down the side of the building.

The pictures below show details of these man-sized animals.

There are also plants hanging out here and there.

The left side of the Nativity facade is – or will be – the main entrance, the Glory facade.  It will be the largest and most striking of the facades.  Alas, it’s under major construction and not much to see now.  Ultimately the facade will represent how the soul navigates Death and the Final Judgment, avoids the pitfalls of Hell, and finds the eternal glory of God.  Expect the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Heavenly Virtues, demons, idols, purgatory, etc.

Opposite the Nativity facade is the Passion facade, addressing Christ’s death and resurrection.  And oh my, is it different!  The Nativity facade was built first because, as Gaudí put it, “If, instead of building this decorated, richly ornamented (Nativity) facade, we had started with the hard, bare and skeletal Passion facade, people would have rejected it.”  The Passion facade’s 4 spires were designed by Gaudí, as were the lower bone-like archways.  Gaudí intended the facade to be grim and terrifying, but with his (few) original plans destroyed in the Spanish Civil War, trustees had to piece together what they perceived as Gaudí’s vision.  Not surprisingly, what’s being done has been controversial (in 2008, more than 100 members of Barcelona’s art and architecture community protested its direction).  The overall appearance of the facade is stark – and

contemporary.  Details of some sculptures are shown below.  This side of the Sagrada is

sooooooooooo different from the Nativity facade!  But absolutely arresting.  A few more pictures of this side of the Sagrada are shown below.  I should point out that whereas the

Sagrada gives the impression that it is mostly gray or tan stone, it does have some fascinating color decorations – often fanciful, and typically on its upper levels and spires –

as shown above.

That covers what we could see of this fascinating basilica from the outside.  It’s amazing, yes?  Designed in the early 1900’s but avant-garde even today.  Gaudí was amazing.  And really you haven’t seen anything yet!  The interior is the mouth-gaping OMG part.  My intention was to also show off the Sagrada interior in this post, but due to my enthusiasm the post is already too looooong!  So you’ll have to wait to be blown away.  The next post will be the Sagrada interior; the picture to the left is just a small taste of what’s to come.  Don’t miss it!

I’ll close with a few pictures of the Sagrada exterior at night.

Stay tuned for the Sagrada Família interior, next post!

 

There are lots of museums in this beautiful city, and we’ve touched on a few already – the Maritime Museum (Barcelona V: La Rambla) and the Museu D’Historia de Barcelona (Barcelona VII: The Old City, called the “Barri Gòtic” or Gothic Quarter).  In this post we’ll visit the small but wonderful Museu D’Modernisme de Català, and then briefly visit Barcelona’s main art museum, Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya.  Somehow we still managed to miss a bunch of museums here, like the Picasso Museum, the museum (Fundació) of Joan Miro, and the Chocolate Museum (we missed a chocolate museum!!?.  Must be an excuse to come back).

Museu D’Modernisme de Català

This small museum is dedicated exclusively to Catalan Art Nouveau (or Modernista) from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.  It’s located in the Eixample neighborhood (Barcelona I, the Eixample) and is fittingly in a Modernista building, a former textile factory built in 1902.  A lot of the decorative art in this museum is simply the furniture from the trendy houses of the newly rich during this period.  Furniture, you sneer?  Oh, wait and see, you skeptic! These furniture makers took art and function to a new level.  As an example, the picture on the left shows an umbrella stand (!).  It’s different, functional and beautiful.

The rich in Barcelona were very rich, and the artists were very, very good.  In addition to the Modernista style of curved lines and emphasis on Nature, much of the furniture I’ll show you employs marquetry (wood inlay).  Using up to 40 different types of wood, the furniture decoration can look like a painting; don’t be fooled, it’s inlay.  There’s a lot of gorgeous furniture here, by many artists, but I’m going to show you just pieces from the cabinetmaker Joan Busquets i Jané, who also did that umbrella stand.  There’s a lot of his work here, all of it stunning.

Below is a writing desk that Busquets made around 1896.  That base may look a bit stodgy, but that hinged desktop!  It’s amazing!  The marquetry of the lady weaving a tapestry is

spectacular; her dress is fabulous, the entire design exquisite.

The pictures below show a 3-panel screen.  It’s really nice, but I’m showing it now because

the one below, a 4-panel screen, is incredible.  Its marquetry is spectacular, but I don’t want you to think that Busquets was defined by this technique.  He was very inventive, and

marquetry was just one of his tools.  Below is an oak piece labeled “office furniture”, with interesting carving.

The coffer-writing desk shown below is spectacular and has a lot going on (maybe too much?), but individual details are wonderful.  That last picture above of the stylized cat

I find quite interesting. Busquets experimented a lot within the world of decorative arts, and his work is considered by many as the precursor for Art Deco, the style that followed Modernism.  That cat is very much Art Deco!

I hope you’re not tired of Busquets, because there is much more!  Below are two display

cases with beautiful decorations.  I personally think the piece shown below is awkward, but I love its rose motif inlay, including what I think is a clear depiction of black spot

(a fungal disease of roses) on one of the leaves.  If true, isn’t that cute??

The item below is called “Hall furniture”.

Humor me with just a few more items from Busquets, an oak dining room table, a

buffet, and one last display cabinet.  Of course there’s a lot more of the decorative arts from other artists in this museum!  A few are shown below.

Some of the furniture in this museum was designed by Gaudí for his famous buildings.  Gaudí designed not only the buildings but also the smallest details in the buildings, including furniture.  The picture on the left is a hat rack of oak and wrought iron from

Gaudí’s Casa Calvet, the first residential building he built in L’Eixample (alas, we did not visit it – not sure you can).  On the right is a “boardroom bench” from Casa Calvet.  The chairs below are from Casa Batlló (Barcelona III: Casa Batlló), along with a photograph of

some of the original furniture in that amazing house.  Interestingly, the secretary shown below was a collaboration between Gaudí and Busquets.  It didn’t say what house the

secretary was from, but the design would have fit in nicely with Casa Batlló.

This museum also has some beautiful paintings, stained glass and sculpture.  Some of the stained glass is shown below.  The first two pictures, depicting a garden, are of a window

from Casa Trinxet, a L’Eixample Modernista building by Josep Puig i Cadafalchin (demolished in 1965 despite public outcry).  The first picture on the 2nd row is just an overview to show that these windows are not small!!  The last picture is cloisonné rather than stained glass.

The paintings aren’t bad either.  The pictures below are from the Spanish painter Gaspar Camps.  What?  You never heard of him?  We hadn’t either; he was born just a decade after

the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, whom we love (and the subject of a post once we write about our Czech visit), and Camps was clearly influenced by Mucha – to such an extent that he was called the Mucha Catalan.  If you like Mucha, you might want to check him out.

Another painter you know by now is Ramon Casas i Carbó, one of the backers of Els Quatre Gats (Barcelona VII: The Old City, called the “Barri Gòtic” or Gothic Quarter), and a big man in the intellectual and cultural scene of Barcelona at this time.  The first two pictures below are very nice charcoal/pastel drawings by Casas.  For the other two

pictures, obviously influenced by the Impressionists, I liked the water in the first and the very Toulouse-Lautrec-ish-ness of the last.

The sculpture was also impressive, as shown below.

Museu Nacional D’Art de Catalunya

Well!  This is developing into a long post!  I spent a lot of time showing you the small Museu D’Modernisme, so I’ll compensate by spending less time at this big one, housed in the grand Palau Nacional (built for the 1929 World Expo).  In truth, part of the reason we spent less time here was an incident involving Barcelona’s high-crime gypsy population.  I’ll tell the story in hopes that readers who travel might be better prepared.  Walking up the subway stairs that lead to the street in front of the Palau Nacional, 3 Romanians tried to steal my camera which (I thought) was hidden in an outer compartment of my backpack.  The theft was well-planned.  With the 3 walking more-or-less abreast right behind me, the middle guy unzipped the compartment holding my camera (without me noticing).  His plan was to yank out the camera and run down the stairs toward the subway, where the passageway splits into different tunnels.  I would instantly notice the change in weight, if nothing else, turn to catch the guy, and bump into the remaining two “innocent” guys right behind me.  What saved me was Ginger lagging behind on the steps, seeing the middle guy unzipping my bag, and screaming for the police.  I whirled and grabbed the middle guy, the other two running up the steps.  I asked Ginger if this was the guy (I didn’t know exactly what was going on, and he wasn’t protesting), but suddenly he whirled out of my grasp and ran down the (marble) steps.  So I tried to tackle him on the steps, from above, but either because my backpack shifted or he turned his shoulders, I was thrown off onto said steps, dislocating my shoulder.  The (plainclothes) police were there almost instantly and caught the other two Romanians (beautiful Barcelona does have a big petty crime problem that they’re addressing).  So the camera was fine, but we spent some time in a hospital and in a courtroom dealing with this issue.  The point: I think we would not have been a target had the camera been in an interior compartment of the backpack.

Back to the museum; in addition to a lot of art, much of it Catalan, it also has magnificent views of Barcelona from its terrace, as shown below.  Often called “the Prado of

Romanesque art”, it holds Europe’s best collection of Romanesque frescoes, mostly saved from remote Catalan village churches.  There’s also a lot of painted wooden alter fronts and ornate statuary.  Alas, those topics, mostly from the 1000’s to 1400’s, are not our favorite.  To be sure, there are paintings from José de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, Fra Angelico, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picaso, but we made a bee-line to see more of the Modernisme decorative arts.  Interestingly, they weren’t better than what we had seen – but, of course, they’re still beautiful.  Below are some pretty spectacular pictures of

cloisonné stained glass.  And below, more furniture (and a vase).

I’ll finish this post with some night pictures from this museum and the “Magic Fountain”.  The area in front of the Palau Nacional was the fairgrounds of the 1929 World Expo, with 3 squares on different levels, waterfalls in  the center, and the Magic Fountain in the first square (all designed by the modernisme architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch).  The Magic

Fountain takes its name from the impression it created in ’29, and it is absolutely mesmerizing even today.  The fountain has a large number of different water jets, a huge number of different combinations, and impressive lighting options.  It’s a water ballet.   I’ll give you a taste with a whole bunch of pictures.

OK!  The next post is not to be missed.  We’ve been saving it for last.  The building of the Sagrada Familia (translation: Holy Family) Roman Catholic church was started in 1882 and taken over by Gaudí 1883.  Today this magnificent Gothic/Art Noveau/Modern incredible basilica is nearing completion (well, within a decade anyway).  Designed 130 years ago, it’s still futuristic.  As one art critic said, “It is probably impossible to find a church building anything like it in the entire history of art”.  And that’s an understatement.  It is breathtaking.  Below are some teasers, pictures from the internet.

 

 

 

Another Barcelona post?  We loved Barcelona, and we’re leading up to showing you the amazing Sagrada Familia – which was recently profiled in Time magazine, even.  Fear not – only this post and one other before we visit that incredible cathedral.

The Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (Hospital of the Holy Cross and of Saint Paul) is a masterpiece of Catalan Modernisme, the turn-of-the-century architectural style that pervades Barcelona and that I’ve been showing off yea these many posts.  The hospital’s construction was started in 1902 by Lluis Domenech i Montaner, one of the Modernisme architects that we’ve met in previous posts (Barcelona II: Casa Lleo Morera, 1905, ; Barcelona IV: Palau de la Musica Catalana, 1908).  Twelve pavilions were finished by Montaner (who died in 1923), with another 15 finished by his son (but only 4 in Modernista style); the hospital complex was opened around 1926.  Although you might think “Sant Pau” stands for Saint Paul the apostle, you’d be wrong; the primary donor for the hospital was Pau Gil, a Catalan banker who left money in his will for a health center bearing his first name.  Somewhere I think there’s a sly sense of humor at play.

The hospital complex that Montaner designed was a “city within a city”, isolated by interestingly turning the square hospital site 45° to the existing street plan of Barcelona.  Clever!  The ground plan of the hospital is centered on intersecting vertical and horizontal axes that create a cross, the emblem of the former Hospital de la Santa Creu.  The individual pavilions are arranged symmetrically along the axes, each pavilion dedicated to a medical specialty (but linked together via underground pedestrian galleries that are pretty spiffy, as shown below).

Montaner was sensitive to the emerging theories of public health, and central to his plans were large open-air areas for patients’ enjoyment and well-being, with two gardens per pavilion.  Each pavilion was named for a patron saint, their statue presiding over the entrance.  With Victorian sensibilities in place, pavilions on the right were for men (with statues of male saints) and pavilions on the left for women (with statues of women saints).  The hospital complex is famous, however, not for its layout but for the pavilions’ fabulous and pervasive Modernisme designs – artistic flourishes of brick, stone, tile and ceramics in spectacular floral patterns, as well as emblems of Barcelona and Catalan history.

So let’s see it!  We’ll start with the entrance pavilion, which housed the hospital administration.  It’s the largest building and has the richest ornamentation.  As shown in the pictures below, the central building is crowned by a slender clock tower (one of Barcelona’s iconic landmarks), with the building’s lateral arms curving in a welcoming

embrace.  In a nice touch, note that the entrance doors (pictured below) are protected by guardian angels, two of which are shown below.

The outside of this building is adorned with other angel statues, statues of Catalan historical figures (mostly at the corners), and 16 impressive mosaic murals that encircle the building and depict events in the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau’s history, a few

shown above.  Modernista detail is lavishly applied to the exterior (examples below), but the art is sufficiently separated that it manages to avoid the “too much” effect.

We’ll come back to view the amazing interior of this building, but first let’s look beyond the entrance pavilion.  Views of the hospital pavilions as seen from the Administration Pavilion are shown below, as well as an example of a garden.  In the first picture, the main

thoroughfare leads to the Operations Pavilion and behind that the Sister’s Convent pavilion.  Look at the open space!  This very roomy hospital/garden concept was a new one in the evolution of medicine, the idea being that trees and plants would provide better air, shade in summer, and a cheerful, optimistic atmosphere for recovery – far different from the previous medieval Santa Creu hospital that it replaced, which dated back to 1401.  The open area of this hospital far surpassed that of any other European hospital of its time.  Although the overall hospital layout is impressive, it’s mostly the Art Nouveau (eg, Modernisme) artwork that makes this a World Heritage Site.  Referring back to the first picture just above, note that the hospital pavilions have a similar structure and appearance – but that uniformity is deceptive; the art on each is a distinct riff on a theme.  As an example, below are the domes on a number of the pavilions; there is very little real duplication.

So let’s look at those pavilions!  We’ll start with the distinctive Operations Pavilion in the center of the main thoroughfare.  As the name implies, it was the surgical center.  Two of

the men’s pavilions are shown below.  The first picture, of roof tops, shows the Pavilion of Saint Rafael in the lower right corner and St. Manuel behind.  The Pavilion of Saint Rafael itself is shown in the next picture, and details of its colorful roof after that.  The Pavilion

of Saint Manuel (from 2 sides) is shown in the next pictures.

Crossing over to the women’s pavilions, the first picture below shows the roofs of the Pavilion of Our Lady of Montserrat, with the dome of the Pavilion of Our Lady of Mercy in

the foreground.  I’ll just show off some of the sculptures from the latter pavilion – the sculptures are always interesting, and all different; and although they’re everywhere, they

fit in nicely with the buildings.  And of course the tiles (examples below) are delightful.

Yes, I’ve shown a bunch of Modernista/Art Nouveau detail on the pavilions, but I can’t resist showing off a bit more of the wonderful art that’s everywhere.

Most of the pavilions are not open for tourists, the major exceptions being the Administration Pavilion and the Pavilion of Saint Rafael (named for Rafael Rabell, who helped pay for it).  The Pavilion of Saint Rafael originally housed the trauma department and had 44 beds.  It retains its original essence today; it has not been renovated or

redesigned.  The pavilions included a broad lengthwise ward for the hospitalization of patients and a circular “day room” in which patients not confined to bed could be with their families.  The walls and ceilings were covered in ceramics for hygienic reasons, since ceramic materials are easy to clean.  Interestingly, in that last picture above, the ceramic tile roses are so very similar to the signature stylized roses of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow from around this same time (Glasgow I, The City).

The other pavilion we can enter is the Administration Pavilion, and it’s the opposite of the very plain Pavilion of Saint Rafael; this Pavilion is gorgeous!  For instance, below are pictures of the foyer, with 9 circular or elliptical vaults clad in striking pink tiles.  The columns aren’t bad either, with their Modernisme flower motifs.  The vaults are decorated

with major symbolic elements, such as the dates (1905 [α] and 1910 [Ω]) of the building’s construction, coats of arms of Barcelona and Catalonia, the cross of Barcelona Cathedral and St. George, etc.  The beautiful stairwell that leads up from the foyer is located

underneath a cupola with a stained glass skylight, exemplifying Modernisme’s focus on light and color.  The cupola is beautiful, and worth a closer look.

Another short set of steps off the foyer leads to this corridor with an impressive tiled

ceiling of many flowers.  The rooms that open to the corridor are also striking (below).

Even more beautiful is the 2nd floor, reached by the main staircase.  Here the vaulted ceilings are 2 floors high, with huge windows.  This first room has 3 gorgeous vaulted

ceilings, shown above (and a view of the Sagrada Familia from the window [it’s coming, it’s coming, promise!).  The adjoining room is even more spectacular; it’s too big for me to capture in an overview, so I had to crib the left image below from the internet.

The floor-to-ceiling windows provide a great overview of the pavilions, as shown in the right picture above, a view I showed you earlier.  The windows themselves are quite attractive, as are the vaulted ceilings overhead.

 

There’s lots of other artwork to show off in this room, such as the impressive wall shown

above.  I’ll end with a few more pictures of this room’s art.

Well, another long post.  There was so much art jammed into this hospital, but somehow it managed to be balanced; beautiful everywhere, but not overwhelming.  Hope you enjoyed it.

Next post – Barcelona’s art museum highlighting the amazing wood inlay art of the Modernista period.

The Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, the Barri Gòtic, was the center of the Roman city of Barcino and, subsequently, of medieval Barcelona; it’s still the site of several government buildings, including City Hall.  Once confined by city walls, its maze of narrow streets periodically open out onto secluded squares ringed with delightful cafes and boutiques.  Happily, much of the Barri Gòtic (“El Gòtic”) – an extensive area – is closed to regular traffic, making it a haven for pedestrians.  However, although several buildings date from medieval times, most of the Barri Gòtic was rebuilt in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when it underwent massive restoration projects for the 1888 Universal Exposition (international fair) and the 1929 International Exhibition.

We’ve seen some of the west edge of  El Gòtic when we did side excursions from La Rambla (post Barcelona V); we visited the Temple of Augustus, the church Santa Maria del Pi, and the plaza La Placa Reial.  In this post we will pretty much walk down the middle of El Gòtic, enjoying fanciful ironwork on its balconies, painted tiles, sgraffito and sculpted

wall decorations (examples above).

Starting from the elegant main Barcelona plaza (the Placa de Catalunya), we’re taking the road Portal de L’Angel into the heart of the El Gòtic, and the pictures shown above are from the early part of that road.  Our first stop is the cafe Els Quatre Gats (The Four Cats, derived from a Catalan expression referring to people who are outsiders or a bit strange).   Time for some history!  Señor Pe Romeu had worked in a French cafe and decided to open one just like it in Barcelona.  He had 3 backers who were major modernist Spanish artists, among them the painter Ramon Casas.  In 1897 Els Quatre Gats opened in a modernist building designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch (you met him in the Barcelona I post).  The owners wanted the cafe to be known for its good and inexpensive food, but also for its “food of the spirit,” a place of music and ambiance where artists could meet to discuss their work or news of the day.  The cafe quickly became a popular haunt for artists (and architects, such as Gaudí).   It hosted performances, concerts, art exhibitions and literary gatherings.  The 17-year-old Pablo Picasso frequented the cafe and held his first solo exhibition in the main room.  So let’s see El Quatre Gats!  The exterior is pretty impressive, with Hobbit-like doors and windows and stone carvings everywhere.

Picasso himself made a poster advertising the cafe, shown below, and inside the cafe hangs a large painting of Ramon Casas and Pe Romeu on a bicycle (the painting by Casas).

Unfortunately Romeu was not a businessman, allowing tabs to go uncollected, and Els 4 Gats went out of business in 1903.  It wasn’t until 1978 that the famous cafe was again reopened to the public; shown below are pictures of the interior of the restaurant as seen today.

Further down we come to the plaza Placa Nova and two Roman towers flanking the main street, shown in the first picture below.  The towers once guarded the entrance gate to

Barcino.  Although much has been reconstructed, the big stones at the base are original.  Before going down that narrow street between the two Roman towers, if we were to look above the wall of buildings to the left of that first picture above, we would see the towering Barcelona Cathedral, shown below.   Let’s go see it!  Walking down that narrow street into the heart of El Gòtic, we pass underneath the attractive Carrer el Bisbe bridge that connects Catalan government buildings, shown below.  Although it looks old, it’s only from

the 1920’s.

The area where the Cathedral now stands has been a center of worship since the 300’s, but the Barcelona Cathedral (real name: Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulali) dates from the 1300’s.  The facade was added in the late 1800’s in Neo-Gothic style called

“French Flamboyant”.  It’s not the most impressive cathedral, but it does have some gorgeous medieval artwork.  We visited it in the evening, so lighting was a bit dim.  We entered directly into the cloister, which was completed in 1448.  Its courtyard is startling – rather than your manicured, mostly open formal-garden-like courtyard, this one is

practically a dense lush forest, with tall trees (including palm trees) and a fish pond/fountain that you can dimly see above.  Pictures of the cloister and some interesting doors are shown below.

It’s hard to capture the layout of the cathedral interior.  The vaulted ceiling covers 5 aisles, but the outermost two aisles are not passageways; they’re divided into 28 chapels.  Interestingly, these chapels function not only as places of worship but also as interior buttresses supporting the roof (note the absence of typical Gothic buttresses on the external walls in the picture of the Cathedral facade above).  Below are pictures of one of the aisles and a view back to the Cathedral entrance.  It does have a rough charm to it.

Views to the alter are shown below, with its 9 radiating chapels.

The decoration covering the point where ceiling vault ribs join is called a “boss”, and the bosses here are intricate and gorgeous, some examples shown below (they’re also hard to photograph with a hand-held camera, in dim light, upside down!).

The ornately carved choir is impressive, with the choir stalls retaining the coats-of-arms of Charles V’s knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece, from 1519.  The nearby organ (1538)

and other details are pretty spiffy.

Now to the good stuff, the art in the many chapels.  There are 28 chapels, so I’m not going to show you all of them!  Besides, many of these chapels feature very large, busy, gilded, ornately carved alterpieces, such as that shown to the left.  They’re not my favorite; over-the-top exuberance can just be too much.  I prefer the old medieval paintings, with their fledgling relearning of perspective, patterned gold, beatific faces, and gorgeously painted vestments.  I hope you like them too, because I’m going to show a bunch of them!

Below are pictures decorating the Alterpiece of St. Gabriel the Archangel, painted in 1390.

I love the general lack of perspective, which wasn’t introduced in medieval painting for another couple of decades.  And Christ ascending into heaven in the next-to-last picture – there go his feet!  Another impressive alterpiece is The Alterpiece of Bartholomew and St. Elisabeth, from 1401, shown below.

I think it’s beautiful, as is the Alterpiece of the Transformation of San Benito from about 1450, below, that the Cathedral considers one of its more important Gothic pieces.  The

artist is Bernat Martorell, who did some really cool stuff (eg, see his painting “Saint George Killing the Dragon”, at the Art Institute of Chicago, at this link:

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/15468/saint-george-and-the-dragon

Another impressive alterpiece is The Alterpiece of St. Clair and St. Catherine, from about 1456, shown below.

Increasingly sophisticated technique is shown in The Visitation, showing St. Luke and St.

Sebastian, painted around 1470.  Lastly I’ll show the Alterpiece of St. Sebastian and St. Tecla, from around 1490.  The paintings are great, as shown below.  It’s always a treat to see art in the space for which it was designed.

OK!  We’re done with alterpieces!  Hope you enjoyed them.  The Cathedral is a veritable museum.

Below are a few more treasures to show off: a chapel with some gorgeous frescos, a baptismal from 1433, and a stained glass window, small and high up, from 1495, – and I think impressive for its time.

We’ll end our visit to Barcelona’s Cathedral with a view of the facade at night.  And with all that walking, how about a tapa or two?

At the start of this post I mentioned that the Barri Gòtic was the center of the Roman city Barcino, so you might guess there are Roman ruins here.  Yep, and they’re pretty cool.  In an earlier post you saw the ruins of the Temple d’August (Barcelona V: La Rambla).  Well, there’s a lot more, thanks to a city renovation that relocated a 1400’s gothic palace to a plaza near the Cathedral, the Placa del Rei, where ruins from a large section of Barcino were discovered underground.  The museum (Museu D’Historia de Barcelona) is centered on the Palau Reial Major (the Grand Royal Palace, shown below) that consists of 3 edifices from 1302, 1360, and 1549.  The picture on the right is the Palace’s main hall, built in 1360, the arches founded over vaults from the 11th century (which were built over a

monumental structure dating from the Visgoths’ rule [5th to 8th century]).  Interesting in its own right, over time the Palace was the residence of the counts of Barcelona, the Kings of Aragon, site of the Inquistion, and the royal administration.

Just for overview, I’ll start with representations of Barcino, shown below.  The excavated

ruins beneath the Placa del Rei date from the 1st to the 6th century and include an extensive area of workshops and an “episcopal ensemble”, the bishop’s residence and other buildings devoted to Christian worship (me – showing a remarkable transformation from paganism to Christianity within 200 years).  We’ll visit a piece of the city wall, ruins of a laundry and a dyeing workshop, a factory for salting fish and making fish sauces like garum, an important wine business, and some of the episcopal ensemble.

We’ll start with the inside face of the city wall, from 15-10 BC; originally 26 feet high, what we’re dealing with here are short sections and foundations, but they are the unaltered real

deal.  The last picture above shows the interior of one of the 78 towers that was built on the outside of the wall; notice the extensive use of recycled material.

Although we’re seeing just short walls and foundations, they’re still pretty revealing, as you’ll see subsequently.   The picture here shows a wall, a door, and a sewer.

The workers’ homes and shops opened to a street, as shown below in the schematic  visualizations.  In the last picture, the street had a portico for pedestrians and led from

the city wall to the forum.  The stone structure in the front is a sewer, reformed in the 3oo’s.

The following workshops are essentially small factories!  We’ll start with the laundry and dye shops from the early 100’s.  The drains and vats contained preserved colorants, lime

and starch for bleaching and sizing, and ashes and ammonia for detergents.  Note: the Romans were not acquainted with soap, and used instead different kinds of alkali.  The most common ingredient was the urine of men and animals, mixed with the water in which the clothes were washed.  The urine was typically supplied by vessels placed at the corners of streets, filled by passers-by.  We’ve come a long way, baby.

Nearby was a factory from the 200’s for salting fish and making fish sauces like garum.  Garum in particular was very popular in Roman times, made by macerating fish offal in

salt, sometimes adding anchovies, oysters, or other shellfish.  We mentioned it before in a (much) earlier post (Malaga, Costa del Sol).

Most impressive is an extensive wine-making facility, used from around 250 AD into the 300’s.  There were several vats for settling and pressing the grapes, transfer ducts for the

must (using gravity flow), and vats for fermentation of the must.  Subsequently the wine was processed and aged within dolia in the cellar, where honey and sea salt were added.

The two smaller vessels embedded in the floor in the pictures above were used to hold the honey and salt.

Also preserved in this Roman area is part of the peristylum (porticoed garden) of an important Roman house – probably the proprietor of the winery and garum factory.

The house is important because in the AD 300’s its owner gave part of his property to the emerging church, making it possible to build a basilica and baptistry in 343 AD.  In the AD 400’s with the increasing power of the bishops, an episcopal palace and hall were built (the city had been conquered by the Visigoths, but they tolerated the practice of Catholicism).  In the 500’s a cruciform church was built within the “episcopal ensemble”,

leading eventually to today’s Cathedral.

Some of the Roman art found in these ruins is impressive for this part of the woods.

Finally I’ll end this oh-so-long post with a walk through El Gòtic just looking at the interesting art on the buildings and the small medieval streets.  It’s an interesting area of this city, and I hope you enjoyed it!

Next post – Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (Hospital of the Holy Cross and of Saint Paul), designed by Lluis Domenech i Montaner and considered to be one of the best Art Nouveau complexes in the world.  You’ll be impressed.

 

 

It was the idea of Gaudí’s patron Eusebi Güell to build a gated garden-centered luxury housing development at Barcelona’s edge, an Eden beyond the Eixample.  It was, however, 100 years ahead of its time and a failure; designed for 60 estates, it sold only 3 and its construction was halted unfinished.  Güell’s heirs sold the site to the city, which decided to preserve it as a public park.  Good decision!  Today the more completed region (the terrace area, or Monumental Zone) is so popular that, to control the crowds, the city had to charge an admission fee ($9!) with timed entry.

The pictures below show the main entrance to the Monumental Zone, protected by fabulous palm-frond wrought-iron gates in front of two gingerbread-like (Hansel and Gretel) houses that were the guard’s lodges.  Behind them is the grand stairway leading to

the “Hall of 100 Columns”, originally designed to house a produce market for the sites’ mansions while supporting a terrace on top.  This “finished” area is the focal point of the park; we’ll come back to it; our timed entry is hours away, so we’ll first explore the public areas – which means we’ll be seeing things in reverse.

Mountains surround Barcelona to the northwest, and Park Güell is in the foothills; from the entrance, the land goes rather steeply uphill over undulating terrain.  To overcome the

topography and connect the intended houses with various parts of the park, Gaudí planned three snaking pathways for carriages, including three bridges.  But this is Gaudí, and these are not your normal roads and bridges!  To minimize the intrusion of the roads, Gaudí designed them as structures jutting out from the hillsides, with separate footpaths in the arcades formed underneath. Designed with local stone that integrates them into the landscape, his structures echo natural forms, with columns resembling tree trunks.  As we come up the hill, the first bridge is visible above us (first picture) and is supported by sloping grotto-like columns and vaults made from unhewn stones.  Different!

The top of the bridge is crowned by balustrades with Mediterranean vegetation, shown below.  The hillsides, by the way, are a happy home to many cute parrots.

Walking further takes us to the other bridges which have a similar creative motif.

The last bridge is also intriguing and leads us to the terrace at the top of the Monumental

Zone, the region that was largely finished by Gaudí.  In the last picture above, you’ll notice that the stones on the columns imitate the trunks of the palm trees planted above them.  The short support columns in the middle of the image have a linear array of holes about half-way up, which Gaudí built so birds could nest there.  Interesting details!

We’re standing on top of a huge terrace centered within the Monumental Zone; in the original plans it was called the Greek Theater, envisioned as a large staging area for

open-air shows that could be watched from the terraces of the planned – but unbuilt – villas.  Note in that last picture that people are sitting on what appears to be a very long white bench that encircles most of the terrace.  The bench is actually in the form of a sinuous sea serpent; the areas of small off-white tiles give it a positively scaly appearance.  The deep curves of the bench form small seating enclaves, cleverly creating a more intimate social atmosphere.  The bench is designed to ergonomically fit the body, and the back is anything but white!  It’s inlaid with ceramic tiles and tile-shard mosaics, in a

symphony of colors and shapes that incorporate motifs of Catalan nationalism, religious mysticism and ancient poetry.  It’s bold and abstract, before there was such a thing as abstract art.

The front of the terrace overlooks the main entrance to the Monumental Zone.  If we had entered the main entrance, we would have seen a grand staircase leading up to the Hall of 100 Columns, as shown in the first picture below.  Notice at the very top of that picture that there are people standing on the roof of the Hall of 100 Columns, which in fact is

the front of the terrace.  The next picture shows the view from that front terrace, looking down at the main gate and some of the grand staircase.  What I want to draw your attention to is the gingerbread-looking house in the background (you also saw it in the first set of pictures in this post) – the guard’s residence.  It’s one of a pair of houses flanking the entrance gate; the other is being renovated and is not currently photogenic, but the two are interestingly Gaudí, as shown in this picture from the internet.  A Hansel and Gretel opera was popular in Barcelona at this time, and Gaudí designed these two guard houses to reflect that story.  The guard’s residence, at the far left, represented the witch’s dwelling (with a poisonous-mushroom-shaped dome).  The smaller house on the right, the working guard house with a visitor’s waiting room, represented the house of Hansel and Gretel.  Closer views of these very interesting houses are shown below.

As we head back to the top of the terrace in order to take steps down to the Park Güell entrance, we notice that the colorful bench lining the left side of the terrace gradually

fades to mostly white colors, an interesting effect.  On our way down the steps to the park entrance we pass through the “Pathway of Columns” that supports a road above projecting out from the hillside.  The supporting columns themselves have interesting sculptures/formations attached to them, as shown below.  The column-lined footpath

under the roadway becomes a long arcade, playfully suggesting a breaking wave forming

a surfer’s perfect tube.  Pretty cool organic architecture!  Which leads to this structure shown below, a fanciful spiral ramp.

The path down takes us to the park entrance, with a view of the stairs going to the Hall of

100 Columns.  Off to the right is an intriguing structure that was designed to shelter carriages and horses on rainy days.

Before heading up to the Hall of 100 Columns, let’s just look at some of the Gaudí-designed details of the buildings.  As usual, they’re playful and different.

The grand stairway is actually a twin flight of steps (with two open landings).  The stairs are divided by two small fountains, one of them a colorful ceramic dragon (looks like a

salamander to me!) that has become the most popular image of the park.

As noted at the start of this blog, the stairs lead to the Hall of 100 Columns, which was originally designed to house a produce market for the sites’ mansions (and to support the terrace on top).  It’s pretty cool, with a mosaic ceiling having the shape of a series of upturned bowls, giving it an undulating feeling.  It’s also studded with colorful medallions.

Our circuit has covered most of Park Güell.  We’ll finish with a tour of the Guard’s House and a quick view of the Gaudí House Museum.  First the guard’s – or witch’s – house.  As expected, few things are “normal” in this house, including the deep blue walls (and blue ceilings!) of the ground floor.  Below are shown some of those “abnormal” features: doors and arches that are parabolic, some walls that join ceilings in a continuous curve,

ceilings that are deeply ridged, stone columns positioned here and there, and some windows that are a collection of pentagons.  It’s all really cool!

Well, hope you enjoyed Gaudí’s fanciful Park Güell.  Gaudí actually spent his last 20 years living in what is now the Gaudí House Museum, shown here, that’s within the Park. In a strange twist, it’s not a house he designed; it was a model home built to attract prospective buyers.

The next post will be on Barcelona’s Old City, the “Barri Gòtic” or Gothic Quarter.

 

 

 

 

This post was written before the terrorist attack on La Rambla in August that left 13 dead and 100 wounded.  Here’s wishing those wounded a speedy recovery, and an end to the scourge of ISIS.

La Rambla (or Las Ramblas) is Barcelona’s most famous street, and its tourist mecca.  “Rambla” means “stream” in Arabic, and La Rambla was originally a drainage ditch outside the city walls.  Around the year 1400 the city walls were expanded, which then included La Rambla.  The stream was diverted to the outside, and the old course of La Rambla gradually turned into a street.  Celebrating its humble origins, La Rambla’s sidewalk undulates like water in a stream – cute, but not so easy to walk on!

Like the Passeig de Gracia in an earlier post (Barcelona I, the Eixample), La Rambla is a tree-lined, wide central pedestrian walkway bordered by one-way service streets.  However, whereas the Passeig is fashionable, La Rambla is instead colorful and gritty, going from the elegant main Barcelona plaza (the Placa de Catalunya that divides the old city from the newer Eixample) down to the rougher areas at the port with its history of lively nightlife, cabarets, prostitution and pickpockets.  Tourism has had its impact with a proliferation of pavement cafes, street performers and kiosks selling newspapers and souvenirs, but it remains a lively and interesting street.  So we’ll stroll down it, starting from Placa de Catalunya; we’ll also take a few diversions up short side streets.  First some looks at the walkway itself!

Looks like fun, yes?  A few steps down the Rambla we come to our first side trip, a left turn and a block into the Old City (which goes by “Bari Gothic” here in Barcelona).  I haven’t mentioned that Barcelona was founded as Barcino around 15 BC when Roman soldiers built a fort here to protect the harbor.   Where we’re standing became the forum and Barcelona’s center until Rome fell 500 years later.  It had an imposing temple dedicated to Emperor Augustus (Temple d’August), and even in the 1100’s the area was called “the Miraculum”, suggesting it was still intact.  However, in the Middle Ages it was demolished, although parts were incorporated into new construction.  A building project in the late 1800’s uncovered four of the temple’s columns, shown below (viewed

after going down some stairs; the Roman street level was 10 feet below today’s level).

One of the major attractions of La Rambla is La Boqueria Market.  This produce market has a lot of “mosts” – the oldest, the most famous, the most central, the most crowded, the most touristy, and probably the most interesting.  We thought it was amazing.  The market has been at this general location since farmers first sold their produce to inhabitants of the walled city.  It now occupies the site of a former monastery that burned in the early 1800’s, now built as a cool glass-and-steel enclosed structure, with multiple vendors for every imaginable food type (and many you’ve never seen before).  The fish stalls look like a marine biology lab.  Some pictures of the market cornucopia are shown below.

Just off La Rambla is the medieval church Santa Maria del Pi (St. Mary of the Pine Tree).

In the late 900’s there was a small Romanesque church outside the city walls by this name; this existing church was built in the Catalan Gothic style within the walls of the Bari Gothic in the 1300’s.  The Catalan Gothic style is interestingly different from your usual Gothic cathedral.  That octagonal bell tower is impressive; it’s 150 feet tall, with 10-foot-thick walls at the base.

Half-way down, La Rambla widens into a small square; below are pictures of typical

buildings and their ornamentation.  The Chinese dragon decorates a former umbrella shop; the wall decorations are impressive!

On a side street a block away is one of the oldest hotels in Barcelona, the Hotel España, which opened in 1859 and was refurbished by Montaner in 1902.  You may remember Montaner from an earlier post (Barcelona II – Casa Lleo Morera).   The hotel has some

interesting features, like the alabaster fireplace and fancy staircases such as the one shown above, but the dining rooms are the real attractions.  The main dining room has gorgeous

tiles, mosaics, wood carvings and paintings in the Modernista style.  The interior dining room has amazing marine life (in sgraffito) swimming around the walls.   The coat hooks

are also fascinating.  The ceiling is pure Modernista.

A short distance away in the Bari Gothic is the Placa Reial (Royal Plaza), an elegant square ringed by yellow Neoclassical buildings and numerous palm trees.  As with La Boqueria Market, big open spaces like this were once monasteries that were dissolved in the 1800’s.  Today the square is a popular meeting place in the summer, a host for many festivals and markets (like the arts and crafts market we stumbled on, shown here), and home to a large number of restaurants, taverns, bars and some of the city’s most famous nightclubs.  Getting to this square from La Rambla is via attractive passages, including the Bacardi Passatge, the first covered gallery of the city, built in 1865.

Across La Rambla and down half a block is another of Gaudí’s buildings, the Palau Güell, a mansion that Gaudí built early in his career (1886).  This palace was built not in the trendy Eixample but in an area known at the time for prostitution and brothels (it’s near the harbor – and sailors).  Although not an ideal location for the Güell family (with 7 children), Señor Güell’s father lived nearby.  Palau Güell is the first of Gaudí’s Modernista buildings, and it’s much darker and more Neo-Gothic than his later work (see earlier post, Barcelona III – Casa Batlló).  Gaudí design is always fascinating; this is his darkest work, so let’s have a look!

Shown below is the outside of the building, with its impressive parabolic-arch doorways

and elaborate wrought-iron work.  The double doorways allowed horse-drawn carriages to enter the home through one door and exit through the other.  The horses could be taken down a ramp to stables in the basement (where the servants resided), while the guests

went up several stairs to the receiving room (the antechamber) on the main floor.

The antechamber leads to “the hall of lost steps” and beyond that, the visitor’s room (where visitors waited prior to entering the Central Hall).  Starting with the visitor’s room, note the interesting marble columns that are a feature throughout this floor, and the

intricate ceiling.  The room in between, the “hall of the lost steps” (I have no idea where the name came from), has an arcade of marble columns, a gorgeous ceiling, and a fancy

entrance to the Central Hall, a room that was dedicated to entertaining and concerts.  This Central Hall is at the center of the main floor and is 50 feet high, topped by a parabolic dome that provided light via a central opening and a series of small holes; at night,

lanterns were hung outside the dome to give the appearance of a starlit sky.  Pretty fancy!  The height of the room allowed concerts to be held with the orchestra one floor above, singers a floor above that, and the organ pipes at the top (the original surround sound?).  Other rooms on this floor were for family purposes.  The “Hall of Intimates” (now empty) was used for gatherings with close friends and a place where the Güell daughters practiced

the piano and gave concerts.  Visible at the rear of the photos above is the family dining

room, with its beautiful carvings, furniture and ceiling.  The dining table and chairs are family originals.

Note Gaudí’s use of geometry in this building – for instance, the cones in the middle of the marble columns, or the parabolic dome and doors and windows and mirrors.  As you’ll see in a later post, geometry became a major factor in Gaudí’s design of his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia.

The second floor contained the private rooms of the family – and as you might imagine,

they were nicely decorated.  You’ll meet the furniture maker Joan Busquets i Jane in a subsequent post.

Finally, a trip to the roof reveals Gaudí’s fantastical chimneys, precursers to the ones we

saw in the Casa Batlló post.

We are almost at the end of La Rambla!  Off to the side is the Maritime Museum, once the city’s giant medieval shipyard.  One interesting display there is a replica of the pioneering

submarine Ictinao I built in 1859.  Nearby on the other side of the street is a section of the original medieval wall that encircled Barcelona in 1378.  The Portal de Santa Madrona is

the only remaining gate of the wall.

La Rambla ends at a monument to Christopher Columbus at the waterfront.  And it’s a nice waterfront!!  Barcelona is one of Europe’s top 10 ports, with busy industrial harbors and cruise terminals, but its beach at the bottom is clean, people-friendly, and fun – and it has

great seafood restaurants, right there on the beach.  This food and the view.  Oh yeah.

 

I’ll end this loooong post with the observation that not all of Barcelona architecture is Modernista – far from it!  This building, at the edge of the waterfront, is a utilities

company, Gas Natural Fenosa; and, as they say, its pretty rad!

And that gets me to exactly 100 photos; but who’s counting?

Next post: Well, we haven’t really walked the Bari Gothic yet, Barcelona’s “Old Town”, but it’s time for a change; let’s revisit Gaudí, but this time not a building.  We’ll tour his park overlooking the city, the Park Güell.

 

 

 

 

This Catalan concert hall is another Modernista building; it was done by Domenech i Montaner (of Casa Lleo Morera fame) in 1908 for the choral society Orfeo Catala.  The hall seats over 2000 and celebrates Catalan culture.  Although the building incorporates the rich floral decoration of stone, ceramic tile and stained glass typical of the Modernisme era, here the design pays strict attention to function.

We’ll start with the outside; today’s entry is a modern add-on, with a courtyard and lots of glass; what we didn’t know until later is that the original entrance, no longer used, was from the building’s side.  Guests entered directly from a small street through beautiful arches surrounded by a richly decorated facade, shown below.  It’s gorgeous!  Today this

cramped street is lined by tall buildings, and it’s not possible to step back and get a good picture of the facade; but hopefully I got enough to impress.

Of course the interior is where the OMG is located.  The lobby is shown below; the current entrance takes you directly to the bar that serves drinks and yummy tapas (Spain is so ahead of the US in certain ways).  The lobby is huge, but it’s broken into more intimate-

feeling spaces by the many cathedral-like columns that frame vaulted ceilings – the vaults defined by tiles rather than stone, a nice touch.  In some of the areas there is extensive beautiful stained glass, as shown in the last two pictures.

Two grand marble staircases lead from the lobby to the upstairs concert hall.  The marble handrails are supported by transparent yellow glass columns – different, but it works.  The

ceilings and underside of the staircases are covered with lightly colored tiles that form gleaming canopies.  Gorgeous stained glass is in the windows.  It really is very impressive!

Going up the stairs, one comes to the two-story-high Lluis Millet Hall, a visually

impressive gathering place for concert-goers and the entrance to the concert hall’s main floor.  So let’s see the concert hall!  The pictures below look toward and away from the

stage.  There’s a lot going on around that stage!  The concert hall is the only one in Europe that can be illuminated entirely by natural light during the day.  The walls on two sides consist of gorgeous stained glass set within magnificent arches – I’ll show them off soon – but the hall is primarily illuminated by an enormous skylight that is directly overhead.  So let’s look up.  Ah – yeah.  It’s awesome!  The skylight is like a huge kaleidoscope, the

design representing a choir singing in the sky around the sun.  What’s really going on, however, is only visible from the balconies.  Take another look at this skylight, bringing

light deeper into the concert hall.  Surprise!  It’s in 3-D!  And spectacular.

The concert hall stage is equally impressive in its own right.  Let’s start with the back wall of the stage, where young women, popularly known as the muses, are playing musical

instruments.  Both the women’s upper bodies and their musical instruments are sculpted in stone and protrude from the wall.  Their lower bodies are done in colorful mosaics depicting regional clothes.  Details of some of the muses from the left side are shown below; the women are playing different musical instruments, and each is wearing a

different skirt, blouse, and headdress.  Some muses from the right side are shown here.

Not to be outdone, there is a whole lot of sculpture arching over the front of the stage!  On

the right is a depiction of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, from an opera with a strong female choir.  Below that is a bust of Beethoven, presumably in honor of the choral “Ode to Joy” from his 9th Symphony.  On the left is a bust of a famous choir director who revived Catalan folk songs (not shown), with a large stone tree above him; below him are girls

singing the Catalan song “The Flowers of May”.   The arch represents folk music on the left and classical music on the right, the two approaching each other at the top.

Need a bit of air at intermission?  The Lluis Millet Hall has a beautiful side room with a door going to a balcony lined by two rows of absolutely fabulous columns decorated with

gorgeous, intricate mosaics – it’s the same 2nd floor balcony that we saw from outside in the very first set of pictures.

I’ve given you views of pieces of this concert hall, now let me try to give you a feeling for the overall effect that includes the concert seating.  That gorgeous overhead skylight (oh, let’s just show it again!) is surrounded by beautiful columns in tile and mosaic and by a lot

of stained glass.  It’s beautiful everywhere you look.  Below are details of the windows and skylights at the back of the upper balcony.

The columns are decorated with floral patterns formed by mosaic and tile.

The columns flare out beautifully at the ceiling.

Finally, some details of the ubiquitous stained glass.

As you might imagine, anybody who is anybody – artists and conductors – have performed in this gorgeous Modernista building.  Beautiful, isn’t it?

For our next post we’ll do a change of pace and tour La Rambla, Barcelona’s most famous street.

 

 

In the last post you saw Casa Lleo Morera, an example of “classic” Modernista.  This time you’ll see a very different Modernista style that’s just one house away from Casa Morera.  Casa Batlló is one of Antoni Gaudí’s masterpieces, a symphony of shape, color and light.  Although it was built in 1904, it looks avant garde even today.  We loved it!  You’ll see in this post (and subsequent posts, culminating in Sagrada Familia) why Gaudí is considered a genius.  You saw the outside of this house in the first Barcelona post, so below are just a few exterior pictures to refresh your memory.  Fascinating, yes?  The allure of the facade is reflected in its many interpretations.  The principle one is that Gaudí

was referencing the city’s patron saint, St. George killing the dragon.  Look at the last picture in the set above; the roof is the dragon’s back (is that triangular window on the right its eye?), the tower on the left is St. George’s lance, the balconies are the skulls of the dragon’s victims, and the columns of the lower windows (previous picture) are their bones.  The other main interpretation is that the whole facade is an allegory of Carnival; the roof is a harlequin’s hat, the balconies are ball masks, and the mosaics on the wall represent falling confetti.  A mark of a great work of art is the controversy it creates, but hey, I know a dragon’s back when I see one!

The story of Casa Batlló is that the industrialist Josep Batlló owned a conventional building at this site (left-most picture below) but wanted a house that stood out; he wanted something audacious and creative.  So he hired Gaudí based on the architect’s incredible Park Guell (wait ’till you see that in a subsequent post!).  He gave Gaudí free rein to do whatever he wanted.  Although Batlló wanted to tear down his existing plain house, Gaudí convinced him that a renovation was sufficient.  I think we can agree that the resulting renovated building is indeed “audacious and creative”.  So let me show you the interior, where audacious and creative continues!  Fasten seat belts.  You should notice during the tour that there are few straight lines or square floors in Gaudí’s house.  “Undulating” is probably the best description of every surface – including walls and ceilings!

The entrance hall leads to stairs and a central well that extends to the roof and is covered

by a vented skylight.  Gaudí was always interested in making his houses very livable, and he used very inventive ways to increase light and ventilation.  In his renovation he expanded the central well to deliver more natural light to the surrounding rooms.  He wanted more light, but he also wanted to deliver uniform lighting to the various floors.  In order to do this, he made the windows smaller at the top (where the light is strongest) and sequentially larger on each floor going down (see first picture below).  He also made the glazed tiles darker at the top and lighter at the bottom where they would reflect more

light (see next picture), again helping to achieve a uniform brightness on the different floors.  The color gradient and the light gradient combine to give an almost uniform color appearance to the central well, as shown in the last picture.  That picture also shows attached structures beneath the windows, which are vent slats to provide fresh air to the house.  Vents are everywhere in Casa Batlló – they’re present on windows, doors and even walls, as shown in the examples below.  Impressive attention to detail, yes?  The central well is also simply beautiful on its own, as shown in that last picture.

OK, back to the house tour!  The building consists of a ground floor, a main floor with a courtyard, four other self-contained floors, a loft and a roof terrace.  The entrance hall leads to the ground floor, shown below.  The two oval skylights in the first picture are

said to resemble tortoise shells.  In the second picture, notice the curving wall and “bug-eyed” windows, and the amazing door.  Different, but the other half of the room is simply a new world.  The astonishing wood staircase resembles the curving spine of some huge

animal.  Further, that curving spine defines the end of the wall!  There is a separate wave of a wall behind it, disappearing up the stairs.  The walls are almost in motion, with subtle patterns of color superimposed over polygonal shapes that refer back to the tortoise shell skylights.  The baseboard molding is wave-like, as is the staircase spine itself.  Descriptions of this room talk of “an underwater atmosphere”, with the wall having the colors and shades of the surface of the sea and sand.  It is the world of Jules Verne.  There is a feeling of being magically inside a wave.

The staircase leads to an elegant and exciting landing on the main floor.  The curving walls, gorgeous wood and large oval windows (eyes?  portholes?) are awesome (pictures

from the internet).  In the opposite direction is a hall, but we’ll continue forward through the major doorway.

The curving walls in this next room have the same polygonal pattern as the ground floor, but the colors are no longer of the sea; they’re a warm brown.  Note that the window shown in the first two pictures below is not planar; the wood frame curves into the room.

There are some surprising details in this room – that mirror/cabinet, for example – but the most notable feature is the cozy, secluded, intimate fireplace alcove that can accommodate just a few people.  As we exit this room through a beautiful three dimensional door – the last picture above – notice the door visible behind it!

The next room has one of those “boney” windows overlooking the Passeig de Gracia, shown below.  The window and its wood surround are amazing.  Vying for attention is this

particularly beautiful 3-dimensional door leading into the next room.  Not only is it a 3-D door, it’s amazingly a 3-D folding door!  Designing that to fit properly sounds challenging!  Like doors and windows in other areas of the house, this organically shaped oak beauty is topped by a header with inset panes of patterned stained glass; it’s also shown (first picture below) from the other side.  This door, and another on the opposite side of the middle room, can fold back to create a single light-filled space out of the three rooms.

Before going into that major middle room, let me give you a wider view of these two rooms from a picture I borrowed from the internet, shown above.  Together, this main suite of rooms is an exciting, light-filled space with wide wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling-high views of Barcelona’s most fashionable street.  I would call it a reverse shop-window display, flaunting its location.  Then, walking into that central room … well; the windows aren’t the only items of interest!  The ceiling is a veritable whirlpool; a wavy allusion to the

sea?  I should remind you that Gaudí renovated this house in 1904; most houses look dated after 100 years.  I think you’ll agree – not this one.

Details from other rooms are shown below.

The main floor also contains a courtyard, which is accessed from the room shown below.  The room has an interesting ceiling (second picture) – perhaps representing a drop of fluid landing in a pool?  This room also has a number of inventive references to the sea.

The door to the courtyard is almost blocked by columns; a barrier between sea and land?  The courtyard itself is a little disappointing; it’s attractive enough, but it’s close to normal

in a house that, everyplace else, is anything but!

The loft of this house is also unusual, with sixty arches that create a space resembling the rib cage of an animal – perhaps the rib cage of the dragon whose backbone arches over the

roof?  The loft was originally a service area for the upstairs tenants, containing laundry rooms and storage areas. It’s beautiful in its simplicity of form and all-pervading light.

And now the interesting roof!  The roof terrace is one of the more popular features of the house due to its famous dragon design.  The arch of the roof resembles the spine of a dragon, a perception enhanced by the ceramic roof tiles that suggest reptilian skin.   The

tiles have a metallic sheen to simulate the varying scales of the beast, with the color grading from green on the right side to deep blue and violet in the center, and then going to red and pink on the left side.  Alas, in the failing light, I can’t capture how vibrant it is.  The roof also has four sets of sinuous and beautifully tiled chimneys that suggest bunches of mushrooms.  They’re absolutely beautiful, with gorgeous patterns; but they’re also very

functional, designed to keep smoke from blowing back down the chimney.

Gaudí was a control guy, not unlike Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, the subject of an earlier blog (Glasgow I, The City).  In addition to designing the building, Gaudí also designed furniture for it; and as you might imagine, it’s also pretty fabulous!  Some examples were on display.

We’ll end this post with a walk back to the main floor – night is falling fast.  That room is

pretty again, in a new light.

So we end the tour of this fascinating house!  It was built in 1904, and today I think it’s still ahead of its time.  It is truly weird – and compelling, and beautiful, and captivating.  Inventiveness is absolutely everywhere, and masterfully done.  We’d live there in a minute!  If this was your introduction to Gaudí, you’re in for a treat – we’ll be doing two more posts featuring him, including our final Barcelona post on his amazing and almost finished cathedral, the Sagrada Familia.

Next post – let’s do a short one; just one building, basically just one room.  It’s the Catalan Concert Hall.  We’ll call it Barcelona IV: Palau de la Musica Catalana.  Here’s a preview.  Don’t miss it!

 

 

Hmmm.  I debated whether to give you a change of pace from Modernista homes along the Passeig de Gracia – there is soooooooo much more to show off in Barcelona! – but decided that these interiors are a natural follow-up and sufficiently interesting that you won’t get bored, so here we go!

We’ll start with one of the finest Modernista interiors in town, that of Casa Lleo Morera by Domenech/Montaner, built in 1905.  What?  A whole blog devoted to just one building’s interior?  Well, you’ll see; it’s definitely interesting.  I’ll call it “Great Mainstream Modernista”.  The pictures below should jog your memory of this house and its ornate

exterior; maybe you’ll also remember the attack parrots (previous post)?

Entry is into a vestibule, guarded by – yep – more attack parrots, shown at the upper edges of the door (for a better view, right-click and “view image”).  You will note from this picture that the vestibule interior looks pretty ornate!  Yes, but it’s ornate with a purpose.  The Morera family wanted the building interior to reference their family name, which means mulberry tree, and that reference is everywhere – exuberantly.  From the entry, marble stairs lead up to an original elevator (the first in Barcelona) and then continue up to an entrance hall.  I didn’t take a picture of those stairs, so I cribbed the first picture below from the Casa Morera website.  Those flowers on the stair risers are mulberry tree flowers, and the mosaics and tiles

along the walls are the same.  The fancy ceiling mosaics show mulberry and other flowers.  It’s pretty fancy – a bit much, really – but as one continues up the stairs to the entrance hall, the decoration gets simpler.

The entrance hall – also the waiting room for Dr. Morera’s patients – to me seems a bit strange.  It’s a small room broken up by 6 doors, with the doors being heavily bordered by protruding stone sculpture.  The undulating ceiling doesn’t help.  Fear not, there is beauty

yet to be seen!  A hint of what’s to come is shown in the nice mulberry designs in the door woodwork.

Two of the entrance hall doors lead to (interconnected) drawing rooms where the family would receive visitors, each room with a view overlooking the prestigious Passeig de Gracia.  The first drawing room is absolutely gorgeous, the more so when you can see it all at once (sorry about that!).  The floral themes are everywhere – on walls, woodwork, stained glass, ceilings – it’s delightful, like being inside a bouquet.  The carved and inlaid

wood ceiling is spectacular, its carved roses reflecting the theme in the stained glass, while the inlaid mulberry flowers reflect the theme in the wallpaper (and floor).  Oh, but there’s more to see in this room!  Enjoy more flowers with the fireplace, wood carvings and floor

mosaics!  The wood carvings are exquisite.

Well, it’s hard to beat that gorgeous room, but the adjoining drawing room also has its charms – particularly the beautiful wood inlay.  The use of different kinds of wood in

subtly different shades at times gives the feeling that the design was painted rather than being wood inlay.

We’re back in the entrance hall, looking at the stone carvings over doorways.  To me they’re too much for a small indoor space, but at least some of them involve a story from a

lullaby, “The wet nurse and the king’s son”, where the Virgin Mary works a miracle by bringing the king’s infant son back to life after the nurse left the child too close to the fireplace (that’s a lullaby??).  The lullaby apparently had some meaning for the Morera family, whose first son died soon after childbirth.  That last picture above shows a hall (with more stone reliefs) leading to the Morera’s living quarters – bedrooms, dining room and smoking room.  Some of the stone reliefs are shown below, including Barcelona’s patron saint St. George (protector of the home) defeating a dragon.  The mosaic floor and

fancy ceiling are also pretty spiffy.

The bedrooms are plain by comparison, but still with profuse flower motifs.  The first two pictures below show Dr. Morera’s bedroom, the next two his wife’s.

The dining room is a continuation of the hall and separates the two bedrooms.  It’s a fabulous, very interesting room, and it was very personal for the Moreras.  The room is surrounded by 8 wall mosaics showing the Morera family enjoying life in the countryside over the 4 seasons (I’m showing you just 4 mosaics).  Interestingly, the mosaics include porcelain hands and faces, I guess to more accurately depict the Moreras.  In addition to

the mosaics, the surrounding wood carving and inlay is gorgeous as usual.  It’s a magnificent room.

The next (and last) room in the house is the smoking room, which is floor-to-ceiling stained glass!  Originally there was a sliding wood door between it and the dining room;

now it’s one large (and spectacular) space that nicely complements the rural themes of the dining room.  Such a large expanse of stained glass is simply dazzling, and its semicircular construction works to immerse you in the scene.  Pretty fabulous!

This was the last room of the house that we’re allowed into, but there is also a patio, accessed via a door in the stained glass wall.  Here we have an entire mulberry tree

in sgraffito, along with other mulberry references.  Down below at street level (seen through the grate) there’s a real courtyard that we don’t have access to.  Turning around, we see the beauty of the smoking room windows from the outside, but – surprise! – there

are 3 more floors of Casa Lleo Morera!  All with their own semicircular stained glass walls!

We exit the way we entered, the stairs circling around the elevator shaft that also cleverly

delivers natural light to the building interior.

Well!  I hope you thought a “classsical” Modernista interior was interesting.  The next post will show the interior of the other major building on the Passeig de Gracia’s “Block of Discord”, Gaudí’s Casa Batlló.  This other vision of Modernista is very different from what you’ve seen; rather than “classical”, I would call it “futuristic”.  You’re going to love Gaudí!