creativity in real time - Gaudi Barcelona

Gaudi Barcelona > Gaudi :::: Batllo (8)

Gaudi's architecture is the blood of Barcelona. Every Catalan, given his choice of genes and attitude, would approach his or her craft with the distinction and lifelong energy Gaudi threw into his buildings. And unlike Gehry or Kahn or Philip Johnson or I.M. Pei, Gaudi micromanaged his works to the chairs and tables contained therein. His constructs are still living and transforming, completely useful places, inhabited. Not galleries or shells around pedestrian office spaces. Inside Gaudi, you might as well be inside the intestines of an alien life form, shaped by fantasy and sculpted by instinct. The pictures in this gallery are of a single work of Gaudi's, his building called "Batllo." Pronounced bhat-yo.A single building in Barcelona.

Batllo: Towers at Night

They keep the place lit, of course, with the tourist cash. And people stumble into it knowing nothing about Gaudi, and jaws drop, and everyone stares. Is this a joke, this building? Could anyone possibly live here? Yes, two of the apartments are occupied. Everyone peers into their windows from the inner well; one of the tenants has a Macintosh and a shredder.
Sean, can you explain this?
No.
Will you try?
No.
Is that it?
I saw it with my own eyes, I can say that much.
Batllo: Spine on Front Top

We stop by for a moment which turns into many minutes and resolve to get inside the next day. But you can't help looking. Like the fish in Bilbo, the Batllo is a building which dominates all other buildings in its sightlines. Even the ornamented neighbors are dulled to supporting roles.
Batllo: On top of Gaudi

Can you see anything special from this faraway shot? How could this building blend in, and what happens when you are close enough to be stirred by its magnet? This is not a spectacle of architecture, but a monster of art, turned utilitarian by the demands of payng patrons. It's a place to die for, and die in. I have to choose between jungle and the fourth floor of Casa Batllo as my final moment of existence, can't tell you which way I would lean.
Batllo: Inner Well

Note the gradation of blue. Was Gaudi trying to make this building a submarine experience? There is a sensation of rising to the surface as you walk through the building, even as the blues get darker and denser with altitude. The texture of the building, its shell, has a tortoise-like energy, slow but methodically puzzled together. Is this really the Sea contained within the soul of the aquatic creature? Is this what it feels like to be a parasite living under the shell of a crab, or on the cartilage of a squid?
Batllo: Ceiling Fixtures & Doorway

Outside, the color dominance is earthy orange and green. The wood inside the building has a deep burnished orange, and the adobe colorings of the ceilings and the walls are also sandy or soiled in their oranges and tans, but there is always a sense of peering out into the blue, into the sea, or being leaked into by the sea. Through windows, stained glass, the well, blue streams in but not so on the roof, where the sun or stars are muted by the warm tones, where there is nowhere a hint of retreating below the surface. It is as if Gaudi made his rooftop furnishings able to withstand the turbulence of other planetary atmospheres. Venus or Mercury would not destroy him, and being inside, below, means you are liquid and alive, blue, the only color of the Earth as you approach it from millions of miles away.
Batllo: Interior Designs

Note the lack of straight lines. Every edge in this building is bumped or knotted or bruised. No razor, no parallel, no perfect perpendicular as promoted by the new age construction sages. If you cannot billow or fluff, do not build!
Familia Sagrada, Constructed

photo taken by Charlie Manhattan. about whom more elsewhere on this site
Sagrada, detailed

photo taken by Charlie Manhattan. about whom more elsewhere on this site