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  • Gaudí Gehry Barcelona
  • Edgar Illas (bio)

Antoni Gaudí and Frank Gehry have one main thing in common: they have designed imaginative and sophisticated buildings that constitute valuable assets in our economy of the spectacle. Even though Gaudí’s modernista architecture is mostly located in Barcelona, whereas Gehry’s postmodern works are distributed throughout many countries, their unique pieces function as free-floating icons that serve the advertising and tourist industries of cities, corporations, and all types of institutions. And yet in the late work of these architects there is a more fundamental and subversive questioning of certain spatial conditions of our system. This questioning unfolds as an opening of architecture to the natural world. Nature here does not refer to the ecological aspects of green or bio-architecture, nor does it relate to Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture or to Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism.1 Rather than searching for a harmonious integration of architecture into the natural surroundings, Gaudí and Gehry approach nature as the other of architecture itself, as a type of deconstruction of the very act of building. This essential questioning might help us rescue the works of these architects from their economic uses and the subsequent denunciations of them as "sites of spectacular spectatorship," as Hal Foster has said of Gehry (Foster, 41).

Barcelona holds Gaudí’s most celebrated works and is also the city that witnessed the emergence of the late, or "second," Gehry in 1992. Gehry’s Fish sculpture for Barcelona’s Olympic Village represented the first computer-aided design of his career and also his first piece embodying natural forms. This essay establishes a link between Gaudí’s most organic piece, the Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Família, and Gehry’s late works. I also rely on Heidegger’s thinking on being and time to draw a parallel between the two architects and read their attempt to imagine an other to architecture as a critique of the ontological closure [End Page 144] of space, a critique that is not unlike Heidegger’s own reflection on the spatio-temporal imperial logic of our world. I finally argue that these architectural and theoretical critiques compel us to open ourselves to the radical outside of historical time and space.

GAUDÍ’S ANTI-GREEK TEMPLE

In 1992 the TV broadcasting of the Olympic Games launched the Sagrada Família as a distinctive feature of Barcelona’s skyline. The unique silhouette of Gaudí’s temple became a key synecdochical element of the global image of the city and, since then, it has largely been exploited by the tourist and film industries, as we can see in movies such as Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother) or Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But Gaudí did not undertake the construction of his temple in order to supply a tourist attraction and an appealing silhouette for the city. In fact, Gaudí’s goal was exactly the opposite: he deliberately designed a temple against modern Barcelona.

The construction of the Sagrada Família began in 1882 under the direction of architect Francisco de Paula del Villar, but Gaudí took over the commission in 1884, when he was only thirty-two. He worked intermittently on the temple until he decided, in 1912, to devote himself exclusively to this project, which he did until the end of his life in 1926. The temple was located in one of the developing areas of the Eixample, the perfect grid that engineer and urban planner Idelfons Cerdà had designed in 1863 to expand the city beyond its medieval walls. Cerdà devised the new Barcelona as a balanced combination of wide avenues, houses, green areas, inside patios, and passageways, in an attempt to reconcile the modern needs of circulation with the comfort of living in a garden city. At the same time, the Eixample represented the urban materialization of the political and cultural renaissance of the Catalan nation; as historian Jaume Vicens i Vives put it, the Eixample was "the tool of a reviving people" (qtd. in Bohigas, 129).2 But, predictably, real estate speculation and the multiple economic interests of the fast-growing industrial city thwarted the full...

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