Madrid and Barcelona

Today was our Gaudi Tour day. We got off to a late start though because there were no taxis to be had. Apparently the local Catalan Parliament was meeting today and government business mint that all the taxis were used for the parliament members. We finally ended up taking a city bus to Park Guell and the ride was actually quite nice. Just outside the park we met Lupe who was our guide for the day.

The park was actually a real estate venture that really never went anywhere except for a couple of buildings that Gaudi designed and the overall Park layout. And now it makes for a wonderful place to escape the city but definitely you don't escape the crowds. Gaudi loved nature and all of his design is to create a place for nature to surround us in our built environment.

From the park within took taxis to go to the Sagrada Familia. This church was the highlight of my trip to Barcelona. I went there in 1980 and so much has changed . There was not even a roof back then. The big push to complete the church really started in the late 80s and it was also when the architects in charge of the work changed over to using concrete instead of individual Stones which is how the church was being constructed up until that time. There's a lot of stone work inside the church now but is now only Stone facing over a poured concrete structure. The overall architecture and color and light is Gaudi's. But much of the sculpture especially the newer sculpture departs from Gaudi's original intent but then again because churches like this take so long to build I expect that he thought that that would happen.

One of the interesting things that Lupe pointed out was that when Gaudi built or rather started building the Sagrada Familia he actually built the walls of one of the transepts to their full height. And this is what I remember seeing plus some of the apse. A transept is part of the church if you think of it as a cross that is the horizontal part. And the apse is the part around the altar at the top. Most big churches are built from the ground up all around and if that was done at the Sagrada Familia the church easily could have changed from Gaud's original design intent, much like Saint Peter's did in Rome. What Gaudi really did is he forced everybody's hand by building the transept walls because the main nave had to be higher so he got his church, and thankfully the Architects of the work kept very close to his design intent for the rest of the church but they were almost forced to do so.Read more