Opinion
Gaudí before Gaudí
When I was studying in Barcelona in the 1970s, I frequented a flat in the Casa Milà, La Pedrera, on Passeig de Gràcia, rented by the parents of a friend from Girona. The exterior was impressive, but the interior, a private house with apartments and offices, depended on the respect of tenants and administrators for its obvious uniqueness. This public neglect of one of the city's most genuine buildings symbolized the distance Barcelona had gradually taken from Antoni Gaudí.
A few years earlier, when the brothers took us on a trip to Barcelona, we visited Parc Güell, the only construction of the frustrated garden city project commissioned by Eusebi Güell from Gaudí. The creative and magical delirium of the park's figures and forms fraternized with dirt and degradation. The continuity of Gaudí's set of works and buildings, avoiding their denaturation or disappearance, had no other guarantee than the myth of the unfinished Sagrada Família. And it wasn't easy either. During the post-war period, there were few names, such as Salvador Dalí or Josep Lluís Sert, who kept references to Gaudí's singular work alive. That was when a devastating letter was published, signed by numerous architects, including Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, asking to stop the works definitively and not finish the temple. A few years later, in a TVE Weekly Report, an enfant terrible of Barcelona architecture went further and even suggested that it be demolished.
The animosity that had been caused by the way Gaudí's work was being continued was evident. Criticism compatible with the obvious fact that today his legacy is placed before the preferences of visitors to the city. I remember that when I was little, at mass, one Sunday a year, the alms brush was passed around to finance the continuation of the works. A parish leaflet seemed to be ironic with a text from which it was clear that 150 years were left to finish the works, at that rate of donations, including a phrase from Gaudí: "My client, God, is in no hurry." Now, with the cheapest ticket at 26 euros and 4 million visitors per year, money is coming out of their ears, but there is no way to finish the works. There was a Gaudí before the current Gaudí. But without the fanaticism of the Japanese, who began to obsessively visit Gaudí's buildings based on a successful documentary by Hiroshi Teshigara, and the pre-Olympic City Council's discovery that the only thing different from everything else that Barcelona could show the world was Gaudí, things might have been different.
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