Against Barcelona?: Gaudí, the City, and Nature

Against Barcelona? Gaudi the City, and Nature Josep Miquel Sobrer is a Professor ofCataUn and Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. He is the author o/X'èpica de la realitat; L'escriptura de Desclot i Muntaner (Barcekna 1978), andLz doble soledat dVlusias March (Barcelona 1987), among other works. He is oho the editor of Catalonia, a Self-Portrait (Bloomington 1992). He currently serves as co-editor o/Catalán Review. If you look North from the fortress mountain of Montjuic, across the rooftops of Barcelona, you will see the emerging mass of the church of the Holy Family , the Sagrada Familia. Once completed, if all goes according to plan, the mass will look like a mountain in the middle of the city. The mountainous appearance of the building was intentional from its conception and is central in the spatial thinking of Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926). As his biographer Gijs van Hensbergen reports, the architect joined the Associació Catalana d'Excursions CientÃ-fiques in 1879, an organization devoted to the study of mountains (92). Gaudi's interest in mountains continued as he developed his ideas of nature (or Nature) as teacher. Notions of the mountain as a place of origin and purity abound in the literature contemporary with Gaudi's career (Sobrer). Barcelona sits at the foot of two guardian mountains: Montjuic and the peak of the Collserola range known as Tibidabo (a reference to Matthew 4.9, when the devil says to Christ: "All these / will give you, if you will fall down and worship me"). The Sagrada Familia, once completed, would triangulate the terrain. The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of plans for erecting some sort of vigilant church overlooking a crowded metropolis. A proposal was made in 1870 in Paris for the construction of the basilica of the Sacré Coeur, or Sacred Heart, on a privileged position at the very top of Montmartre and fundraising began in 1873. The architect Paul Abadie designed the church in the Roman-Byzantine style. The first stone Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 6, 2002 206 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies was laid in 1875 and the basilica was completed in 1914 and consecrated after the war in 1919. Its dominant location can be easily exploited, as the Nazis did famously in their propaganda newsreels when diey took over Paris. Barcelona soon followed suit, erecting its own mountaintop basilica. In 1902, construction began on the Expiatory Temple of the Sacred Heart atop Tibidabo; the building was designed by Enric Sagnier in the neoGothic style and was clearly meant to impress onlookers near and far. Land for the temple had been given to the Salesian order of San Giovanni Bosco in 1886. The other expiatory temple in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia, is being built in the city barely above sea level; it is to be a mountain itself rather than sit on one. The Sagrada Familia—work on which began in 1882—has attracted universal fame. Leaving aside its status as a world-class architectural landmark, the Sagrada Familia attracts the attention of students of cultural phenomena and of scholars interested in the relations between culture and physical space as well as, more particularly, between Gaudi and Barcelona. The relations between the Sagrada Familia and the city that houses it present a paradigmatic process worthy of attention. Busloads of camera-toting tourists flock to the Sagrada Familia daily and pay the price of admission to take a closer look; the revenue thus generated reverts in great part to the continuation of the works. Many of the tourists become enthusiasts; a web search on "Sagrada Familia" produces a number of giddy sites online, with detailed pictures taken from gravity-defying positions. One can feel the awe that the building inspires, an awe on which recent films capitalize: Ventura Pons's Food of Love and Susan Seidelman's Gaudi Afternoons have been released in the "Gaudi Year" of 2002. In its monumentality, the Sagrada Familia is a triumph, an outburst of imagination and playfulness. The visitor cannot fail to admire the mixture of religious and natural motifs in the church's decoration: columns resting...