Gaudi & Street Art

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We started the day with an early morning visit to Casa Battlo beginning at 8:30. The museum doesn’t really open until 10 which meant we had over an hour to wander with our audio guides while the building was pretty much empty. This made a huge difference. The audio tour included a virtual reality tour on the device that showed the rooms with furniture, so you could see what the residence looked like. The house is built around a center stairwell that is open at the top to let in light and air. The tour explained that Gaudi had used increasingly darkened blue tiles as he went up since it is brighter at the top than at the bottom the color gradation compensated for the light, so the color looks uniform from top to bottom…and it does. It was fascinating to see how much of the design was done to make the house more comfortable for the residents. What is truly amazing is that Gaudi worked without architectural plans; he built a model and had drawings, but no actual plans. In addition, he was a perfectionist so whatever was being built took an extra long time and cost overruns were the norm. Evidently, he was very difficult to work with given is exacting requirements, but people loved to work with him because he treated them as collaborators on whatever project was under construction. While his designs look unique and completely innovative, Gaudi claimed that we were not an inventor or a genius, rather he was an observer and used what he saw in nature in his buildings. For example, his columns are not perfectly vertical but lean to one side. He used this technique because when he was walking and wanted to lean on his cane, he would not hold the cane perpendicular to the ground, but rather at an angle to bear more weight.

After this, Jack went back to the apartment to relax and I went on a tour of the Palau de la Música. The building was finished in 1908 to accommodate the city’s premier choral group. The group was very forward looking because it included women and women comprise a disproportionate number of the human sculptures in the hall which was very unusual for the time. The architect was Gaudi’s mentor, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and was a modernist/naturalist. His design was more conventional, but still extremely creative with homage to nature everywhere. His columns were shaped to symbolize trees and they spread near the ceiling where the branches appear on the ceiling. Each is covered with small pieces of ceramic tile forming patterns of flowers with no two columns the same. 500 craftsmen worked on the construction and the building was finished in 2 years and 10 months. Considering the complex stained glass, sculpture, metal work and ceramic tile, it is amazing that it was built in such a short timeframe.

Our afternoon was our 4-hour graffiti tour. When I was booking the tour, I kept getting confused when scanning my emails because the tour guide’s name is Olga Alexandrova, which sounds Russian rather than Spanish. From what she shared with us, her father’s family members were Russian Jews who left Russia at various times during the second half of the 20^th century primarily moving to Israel. Her father stayed and married a Muslim woman. It was an arduous courtship because while her father’s family were educated, the mother’s family was not, and it took 10 years for them to agree to let her marry a Jew. Olga had been living in Barcelona for 7 years, she is most interested in modern art and her partner/husband (it was unclear) is a student of hip-hop. In 2006, the city government decided that it wanted to clean up its act and banned graffiti. If you are caught putting up graffiti the fine is 300 – 3,000 euros. Clean-up crews contracted for by the city, go around painting over any graffiti they find. There are a couple of exceptions, a small number of public spaces and doors, the rolldown iron shutters in front of stores and windows of privately owned buildings. The clean-up crews leave these spaces alone. We started in the Born district and ended up in El Ravel. Born is middle class and El Ravel is the poorer section of the city that is home to new immigrants and artists, like Olga. Her perspective was somewhat different from ours. We came across and lovely wood paneled door that had just been put up and the owner did not want it covered with graffiti. We asked if there was a way an owner could indicate that they didn’t want their door decorated/defaced (depending on your perspective). The response from Olga implied that a street artist had every right to decorate the door. The owner’s only recourse was to cover the door in thick plastic that was repeatedly torn off and needed to be replaced. The door had been spray painted that it was covered in a condom. At the end of the tour Olga, told us she was surprised when she met us that we were so old and even more surprised at our age after 4 hours of walking. Jack took lots of pictures. Personally, I didn’t find the graffiti nearly as interesting as either Tel Aviv or Brooklyn because of the space limitations.

Jack had a call with the group in Israel that he is working with in his new nonprofit commitment. I hiked over the La Boqueria the city’s food market. By the time I got there, more than ½ the stalls were closed. On a foody video on YouTube, I had heard about Spanish ham and it was everywhere. It was disappointing, as was pretty much everything I got.

We had tickets to see Pedro Gonzales at the Palau de Música that evening. He is a world famous flamingo guitarist who was accompanied by 3 other excellent musicians. His performance was outstanding and in addition to the music there were two flamingo dancers who were also terrific. Here’s a link to his version of Dire Straights Sultan of Swing. Very different from the Lindy Hop of the prior night except for the fact that both required incredibly fast footwork.

We had been planning on getting to bed at a reasonable hour, but had a hard time getting a taxi home.

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