Gaudí in Barcelona: Spectacular and unique

SW side entrance to La Sagrada Familia - The Passion

Some people, I know, have heard of Antoni Gaudí. Many have not, however. And unless you've studied architecture or Barcelona or something related, it's hard to come to grips with how exceptional his designs are. I taught architecture for many years and thought I knew what to expect. I certainly was looking forward to my first visit to Barcelona with great deal of anticipation. But even so, I was not adequately prepared...

Portal detail, NE side entrance to La Sagrada Familia - The Nativity

We didn't beat around the bush. We went to see Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece first thing in the morning on our first day in Barcelona. La Sagrada Familia is a cathedral and having seen large gothic cathedrals its size was not unexpected. And I was familiar with his unique organic style from photographs. But the scale of it all and the sheer beauty was breathtaking. He achieved a monumental scale without the bulky encrustments of flying buttresses that make the exteriors of gothic cathedrals seem impenetrable. The stone appears to float upward rather than to press down on the earth. The tall spires remind me of beach castles made by dripping wet sand.

The sense of floating was even more pronounced on the interior. The abstract stained glass cast uneven colors into the vast nave, one side warm reds, oranges and yellows, the other cool deep blues, aquas and pale greens. 

The vault appeared to be supported on the trunks of great trees that led the eye upwards towards an eerie configuration of circular forms. I felt as though I was being inspected by a gargantuan spider with multi-faceted eyes that hovered overhead in wait. 

It was a cold, blustery weekday morning and yet the entire interior was full of people before we left. We learned that this building, which had been abandoned for decades after Gaudí's untimely death in 1926, is now the single most popular tourist attraction in Spain. But it is hardly the only one...

Casa Batlló is an apartment building squeezed among a row of them along one of the major boulevards in the center of the city. The facade is unlike any of its neighbors, however, with its colorful and undulating art deco detailing. We almost didn't go inside. We'd just come from La Sagrada Familia (ticket price: 29 euros - over $30). The price of admission at Casa Batlló was 22 euros and we balked briefly. But our traveling companions convinced us to pop for it and we were blown away for the second time that day.

The entire building, the maintenance of which is supported solely by those steep admission prices, has been turned into a museum and it didn't take long to learn why. Every detail has been meticulously restored and preserved--and by every detail I mean that Gaudí actually designed every single thing in the building. (This was reminiscent of Gaudí's contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, who also famously designed buildings down to the doorknobs and dinnerware.)

One of the many remarkable details was the tile in the atrium that rose through all six floors. Cast in shades of blue that grew progressively paler in hue so that it would all appear uniform as the natural light coming down through the skylight diminished. 

Gaudí is famous for his chimeys and Casa Batlló is an example of why this is so. Another novelty characteristic of his style (and also in harmony with the style of the Art Deco period to which he relates) is the fact that he designed the entire building without square corners.

The attic floor clearly demonstrated his novel and effective use of the catenary arch, which we learned is at once derived from nature and inherently more stable than other arch shapes. Gaudí employed it in many of his designs, including La Sagrada Familia.

For a change of pace we next went to a park. Of course it wasn't just any old park. Parc Güell, as it is called, was also designed by Gaudí. In this view across the terrace the spires and cranes above La Sagrada Famila can be seen in the left background. The terrace and main entrance area to the park required another admission fee. This time we chose to go around to the public (free) sections. We were not disappointed.

The park rises up a steep hillside and the main design feature is a serpentine walkway that leads throughout the park and up to the summit.

As with his buildings, the causeway-like structure was organic in character and utterly
unique in style.

Beneath the Gaudí arcade we enjoyed lovely strains of music by a local duo who played instrumental covers of popular songs by the likes of Coldplay. 

Later in the week we toured yet another of Gaudí's masterpieces, Casa Mila, aka La Perdrera (the stone quarry). Unlike Casa Batlló, this multipurpose structure is still in use, with commercial enterprises on the ground floor and residential apartments above. 

One of the highlights, again, was the rooftop with an even more elaborate (and famous) display of chimneys. Here you see just a few of the many.

The structure is organized around two atriums, asymmetrically located. The tour did include one apartment that has been restored with its original furnishings.

You know right away when you see the door to the building that you are in for an unusual architectural experience.

So, there you have a brief selection and quick tour of Gaudí in Barcelona. We did go back to La Sagrada Familia on our last day there, in order to see it at night. 

The omnipresent construction cranes were even more prominent lit up by the floodlights that illuminate the facades at night. 

For a few more photos of Gaudí and many more photos from Spain, go to my Flickr album.

And if you missed my earlier posts from Spain, scroll down or click the links to check out Calatrava in Valencia and the Miró Museum.

Valencia does Calatrava in a BIG way!

Valencia is on the Mediterranean Sea on the east coast of Spain. Milwaukee is on Lake Michigan on the east coast of Wisconsin. Valencia and Milwaukee, with metropolitan areas of about 1.5 million, are approximately the same size. Aside from those two facts, the two cities have almost nothing in common. Oh, except we do have Calatrava.

The difference is, while Milwaukee is justifiably proud of its iconic Calatrava-designed art museum, the suite of buildings that world-renowned architect designed for his home town make our single structure look downright puny. Yes, there are people in the photo of the Science Museum above to give it scale, though you'll have to look closely. The Milwaukee Art Museum's Calatrava wing could fit inside this building--with its wings open--and there would still be room to spare. But wait! There are four more buildings in what is known as the City of Arts and Sciences--along with two bridges.

The opera house (above) looks like some kind of alien spaceship out of Star Trek has landed in this medieval city. In fact, nothing in Valencia--or pretty much anywhere else--prepares the unsuspecting visitor who happens upon this futuristic assemblage of structures. Allow me to take you on a tour...

Panoramic view with the Planetarium in the left foreground and the double arcade called L'Umbracle on the right.

The Agora, a concert and exhibition hall, seen here through the cable stays of one of two Calatrava bridges that cross over the complex, which is in a park setting that is below the surrounding city.

The dome of the Planetarium seen from the promenade of L'Umbracle.

The open arcade of of L'Umbracle, which sits atop a parking garage, is a rigorously ordered botanical garden...

...and the promenade doubles as a showcase for contemporary sculpture. The installation on view when I was there was by an artist named Rogério Timóteo. Behind the sculpture you can see (left to right) the Science Museum the Agora and the asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge.

L'Umbracle at dusk.

The Science Museum after dark.

And the opera house... whew! I was there and it's still hard to believe it's real.

Stay tuned. These Calatravas in Valencia were spectacular, but Barcelona has Gaudí. I'll show you those soon.

Meanwhile, if you missed my review of the Miró Museum, click here.

The Hermitage Museum: Art overload!

Pavilion Room

Everyone warned us: It's too big; you can't see it all. The largest art museum in the world, according to Wikipedia. Well, true as that is, we managed to see a lot of it. My wife, Lynn, and I spent an entire day, with a brief pause between the main buildings (the Winter Palace and the various Hermitages) and the annex, which bears, with more than a whiff of bureaucratic understatement, the pedestrian name of General Staff Building. While we skipped a couple of whole sections (the collection includes vast amounts of coins and medals) we made certain to check off all the main rooms and most of the (few) quiet corners on the guide/floor plan.

Jupiter

We were not rushing, either, like some folks we observed, who pushed through the crowd, raised a cell phone momentarily and then sped off, not bothering to look around.

The Throne Room

That practice was bad enough with a single, self-contained work of art like the Jupiter, above, but I saw it happen, too, when the "subject" was an entire room. For example, the Throne Room with its crimson velvet walls and gold-encrusted detailing!

Winter Palace, viewed from across the Neva River

And so we spent an exhausting day of artistic overload. And the question becomes one of how to convey even a portion of that in this report. Obviously, I had to be selective. Trying not to be tedious. What I have chosen to share is blatantly subjective and not encyclopedic. After all, you can take a virtual tour of the entire collection on the Hermitage website. I will go lightly on the descriptions, too, except where I feel my idiosyncratic choices bear explanation.

Landscape/Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Claude Lorain

We tried to admire individual paintings.

But it was challenging, what with the salon style hanging...

Danae, Rembrandt

as well as the crowds.

The Rembrandt Room was probably the single busiest gallery. A wee bit frustrating. But imagine it: there is a whole room full of Rembrandts!

Roman Charity, Peter Paul Rubens

And Rubens! After viewing all the paintings in this grand gallery--all Rubenses--we found yet another whole gallery devoted to Rubens. And those were the real McCoys. After that came the room full of "school of" Rubenses.

And when you got tired of looking at paintings or sculptures...

...there were always the walls themselves to admire. (This is not wallpaper.)

Not to mention entire rooms. Here we have the Gold Drawing Room. (And that doesn't mean gold paint.) If you look closely you will see that there is a painting in this photo, but I didn't notice anyone looking at it. In fact, the entire museum had something of a split personality.

Crucifixion

Parts of it clearly looked like an art museum (you know, like the Louvre, for example), but other parts were far more reminiscent of--well, they actually were in fact--a palace (on the order of Versailles, e.g.). In Paris you had to go to both of those places to get the full effect. Here you could be overwhelmed by all of it at once.

This is a fireplace!

One of the most popular rooms was the Boudoir of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Czar Alexander II.

The Grand Church of the Czars is a study in characteristically Rococo excess. This is the view of the apse from the rail in the center of the room, which looks deceptively vacant (because you can't go past the rail.)

But turn around and you get a sense of the crowd.

One of the crown jewels of the collection is the Peacock Clock, with its three life-size, gold, mechanical peacocks. They're in a big glass enclosure and they move, but what struck me most was the people crowded around this video monitor instead of the real thing. Some of them are videotaping the video. (I kid you not!)

Hall of Portraits

Wall of portraits

It was a treat to round a dusty corner in an otherwise utilitarian stairwell and to find this exquisite sculpture idling in a corner. Ancient precursor to the frisbee, it seemed to us.

Or simply to stand in a grand hall and look straight up for a change of perspective.

Sorry! I couldn't help myself. Heading down to the basement to look at the Siberian galleries, we had to pass through the gift shop...

and a room of medieval armor...

and what we dubbed the Hall of Packing Crates.

Remnants of a Cape

As spectacular as the rest of the museum was, we particularly enjoyed the Siberian Antiquities, which, being in the basement, looked like any other museum as opposed to a palace.

This tiny wooden deer finial from a 5th-4th century barrow put me in mind of Middle Earth, as did a number of other Siberian artifacts.

How remarkably well-preserved is this 2,300-year-old felt swan, one of three dug from another burial barrow!

Finally, before we leave the Winter Palace for the General Staff Building, I want to introduce you to the most impressive single artifact I found in the Hermitage. No, it's not a Rembrandt or a velvet and gilt Boudoir, peerless as those things are. It's this 4th century B.C. Siberian pile carpet. "The earliest surviving pile carpet in the world,"

Siberian pile carpet detail

The beautiful design is one thing. But the craftsmanship...: It is woven with 3600 "double symmetrical Turkish knots" per square decimeter (tenth of a meter, or about 3 square inches if my calculations are correct.) The total number of knots in the carpet is 1,125,000 with a pile height of no more than 2mm. This was mind blowing.

So, we'd been inside for over 4 hours at this point with no more sustenance than illicit granola bars. We had seen the view above from one of the windows facing the plaza in front of the Winter Palace. Time to go out and see what's up with that. (The General Staff Building is across the plaza, too.)

Lo and behold, we witnessed a display of Soviet arms and armaments and troops in WWII era uniforms.

It turned out that, coincidentally, we had shown up on the day of the 75th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Russia. It felt spooky to us, but Russian and even Chinese tourists lined up to pose with "Soviet" soldiers.

It was disorienting as well as spooky to see Soviet tanks sharing the plaza...

with Rococo carriages from the period of Czar Alexander and Peter the Great. This is Putin's Russia, it seems.

Before we head back inside the General Staff Building for a much briefer (I promise) look at the collection of Modern art, two contrasting elements on the exteriors of the two buildings. Here, above, is "The Artist," just one of about a million larger-than-life-size statues on the Winter Palace and Hermitages.

And outside the General Staff Building, the far more martial, vacant armor motif that is repeated over and over, which reminded me of the Hapsburg's Schonbrunn Palace Statues of the Guardians in Vienna. All in the family, no?

As you can clearly see from this shot of one of the several atriums, the General Staff Building is quite different from the main Hermitage Museums. It is spare, spacious and largely vacant. If you look closely you will see that there is in fact one (large) painting in this enormous space.

Most of the galleries, while smaller, are equally spare and utilitarian. Kind of like many other art galleries. One similarity to the main Hermitage galleries across the plaza. Here as there you can find entire rooms devoted to one artist. These are by André Derain. There are rooms for Picasso, Bonnard, Kandinsky, and many others.

The Red Room (Harmony in Red), Henri Matisse

Matisse, for another example. There is so much space in this building that some paintings get an entire wall. (There are also empty rooms. More art to be installed.)

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My favorite display in this building was a small gallery called a "cabinet" where glass cases held artists' books. In this case, several artists: Braque, Chagall, Matisse, Miró, and Moore (news to me that Henry Moore made books unrelated to sheep.)

Manet designed this lovely, simple book plate for Edgar Allen Poe.

Okay, we're done. If you're still with me, bless you. Your reward is Blue Landscape by Paul Cézanne.