Interview with Cablevision Cindy Younker

Interview for CABLEVISION to Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa

held at eiroa architects Central Park West, New York City, on September 2006

GUELL PARC, Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona, Spain.

 

WHERE IS THE PARK LOCATED WITHIN THE CITY OF BARCELONA?

The Guell park is located on the north-west side of Barcelona. The Original Idea of the park was to become an isolated Colony of single houses in a site at the Montana Pelada, Els Tres Turons, Barcelona. 60 parcels in a triangular shape, distributed around the mountain, were going to be available for the construction of high category houses with open views to the city and the sea on the background.  It is a suburban park, but now after 100 years of its construction, the mountain is integrated to the border of the city of Barcelona right at the

 Gaudi refuses to adapt the landscape, but let the art adapt to the existing nature.

Gaudí wanted to cooperate with nature, so he ordered the creation of an autochthonous natural area based on Mediterranean species, which are stronger, but require less water and maintenance. He did not only respect the atmosphere by planting trees. When a topographic map was made of the fifteen hectares which Güell had purchased, Gaudí observed that, given the characteristics of the land, many leveling and embankments-which would ruin the beauty of the land-would be necessary to build roads, so he designed the famous viaducts which allowed the mountain's natural shape to be preserved. These viaducts are supported by inclined columns, with manufactured brick centers, covered with natural stone from the site. There is a total of three kilometers of roads, with grades from 6% for cars up to 12% for pedestrians.

   

HOW DID THE PARK COME TO BE BUILT? 

 The process of demolishing the wall, from 20 hectares to 200 hectares made a big change in the scale of the city. 1854 Idelfonso Cerda widening of Barcelona with the particular big corner diagonal blocks.

New demand for developing housing, churches, but also palaces and other interesting buildings.

Barcelona had a new politic agenda, autonomy, the Catalonian Nationalism and the reform of the Estate. New Industrial bourgeois, in the search for a new form of city and the image that the architecture may provide for it.

The idea of city of the bourgeois and the advancement and change that this process played in the Modernisme Catalan.

 The contact with Eusebio Guell, with the reforming social ideas that came from England, influenced on the promotion of building a suburban garden of the residential type, known as the Guell Park between 1900-1914, but also a workers colony in Santa Coloma de Cervello. Guell was familiar to the ideas of Howard and the Industrial City, and was usually in contact with intellectuals, architectd and politicians of the beginning of the century.

 Eusebi Güell wanted to build a residential area on an estate on the mountain Muntanya Pelada in the district La Salut, which had to be inspired by the garden-city concept. Here, the return to a healthful and natural state was propagated, a flight from the unhealthy city. Gaudi was busy with the construction of the park from 1900 until 1914 and went to live there himself, in 1906. Of the planned 60 houses, only two were build, for lack of interest and financial problems. 

Gaudi’s work consisted of designing a series of paths and roads, the gate of the site and the construction of the necessary services for these houses isolated from the city fabric.

 He also began Park Güell (Güell Park), which was first intended to be a garden-city, with sixty homes for the upper middle-class, with various common services. Park Güell could be considered an environmentally sensitive development. Changes in the natural shape of the land were avoided when laying out the streets; remains of broken pieces from ceramic factories were used in the spectacular mosaics; and felling of trees was absolutely forbidden.

 Controversial facts about the New york process for the World Trade Center. WTC.

I was involved on the process of the world trade center, playing an important role working as a designer for the Team of Richard Meier, Eisenman, Gwathmey and Holl. We developed radical ideas for the site, many teams did, we were imagining the opportunity to show the world what architecture could do for a special situation like this one, a place of memory because of the events of 9-11, but also a place to present within the thematic of memory, the new ideas for a city and for ways of imagining differently living on the high rise. What Mr Silverstein is doing as a New Yorker, as a bourgeoisie, as an important businessman has no meaning for New York City, or for himself. Private will, not public opinion, retrograde attitude, just no ideas of a developer that cannot imagine the city further ahead than the envelope of this conventional skyscrapers. You hardly see the kind of social motivation that was in Barcelona and that allowed Gaudi to exist in today’s society. That intellectual motivation of advancement, illumination, the search for the rational of what is best for everyone, for the public interaction and the representation of the culture that we all represent in our cities. Little of this is seen today at the new World Trade Center process, where instead of a presenting a vision of a site that could take the lead in urban renewal, directed by business people with vision, instead we have a greedy business man that chooses not to risk, but to represent the bad trade, the personal monetary benefits without any imagination for the city, but conventional independent private developments that add frustrated, poor, bad unimaginative, iconic attempts of generating a false symbolism which its ultimate strategy is to get rid of people’s opinion in order to complete the many times seen and repeated real estate agenda. In other words, we need more of the spirit of the time of Gaudi, people who were supporting art, that were also thinking on something else to prosper their interests, an imaginative growth of the city that represents the intellectual and creative ambitions of a city. What I see now is no ambition of any kind, not even a real innovative commercial ambition.   

THE ROOM OF 100 COLUMNS.

The hypostyle hall

The Sala Hipóstila, which was intended to function as the development's marketplace, is made up of 86 classical columns, 6 meters high and 1.3 meters in diameter, with the lower part covered in white ceramic and the rest with a grayish rustic stone. The exterior columns are slanted in order to give the structure a more monolithic appearance. Four of the interior columns are missing; there are soffits designed by Jujol in their place. Between the columns, there are lintels of reinforced concrete that divide the ceiling into squares, on which there are inscribed partial spheres covered with white ceramic.

 The Greek theatre is a large esplanade which rests on the Sala Hipóstila and the mountain. It is bordered by a marvelous curvaceous bench on the side nearest to the sea, and a semicircular promenade at another level on the side nearest to the mountains. The curves of this bench are based on the placement of the columns which support it, as well as Gaudí's organic ideas; in this way he gave life to his work. There are small semicircles which allow for gatherings among visitors. The esplanade's drainage was engineered without inclines; the water passed through the soil and flowed to the pendentives of the spherical segments on the roof below, as was mentioned before, and drained through the hollow center of the columns of the Sala Hipóstila to a 1200 cubic meter underground tank, below the Doric porch.

 They present an impenetrable forest of columns that present two problems. First that appears to dissapear behind, and then that appears to be disordered like a forest.

 The colomns come from the forest, the columns thanks to Greece becomes a forest again. It seems to be a mourining of the columns itself as a language that becomes natural again. 

 Güell Park could be used today as an example of environmental-friendly land development because of its total respect to the natural environment, as well as the use of recycling in the creation of most of the mosaics, since the ceramic came from factory wastes. 

 

THE PAVILIONS AND THE ENTRANCE.

 The only buildings that were constructed were the one related to the gate access to the park and the administration building.

 The park is surrounded by a rubblework wall, which is crowned by the undulations of ceramic "trencadís" (a type of mosaic made from broken pieces of tile) and seven gates. These pavilions, built between 1901 and 1902, have an egg-shaped form with the complete absence of straight lines or angles, and their structure is based on wrought reinforced ceramic beams and brick vaults supported by weight-holding walls.

 GAUDI’S ATTRACTION TO ANIMAL SHAPES/NATURE IN HIS ART.

 The park presents the abandonment of stylistic architecture referents, which is present in most of his other work. This abandonment is replaced by a different unique language of continuity. That was perhaps the architecture formal preoccupation and the solution was found in nature. Continuity and the use of complex geometric forms of the surfaces collaborated to such an invention.

Nature and Man.Nature and God.Mimetic, but manipulated to express…Columns tilted in an angle, like Gothic arbutants, but more like trees that have a movement.

Style. Eclecticism as experimentation.Figures, Code, Motifs, Symbol, Icon, Alegory.

Classical codes are a series of static relationships, proportional conventions that are not, as will be proposed below, generative material. These proportional conventions are usually measurements of presence and palpable geometries, rather than spatial forces and relations. “

 I depart from the problem set up by an architecture historian (Manfredo Tafuri) that architecture has the problems of a language. In this sense, as language, architecture works with recognizable codes, implicit symbology, specific motifs, accepted icons, and iconography and even moments in which allegories play are representative of ideas in the building. All of these linguistic tools, in one way or another, are present through in Gaudi’s work. Dealing with a language, history and the structure developed through history are also important too. Then what Gaudi does in this respect is to use at once all of the elements in history, but as fragments and modifying its original classic meaning by distorting and displacing at least two of its original aspects formally so that the effect linguistically is of a different kind, therefore a different speech and meaning. What it is also interesting is that even thought he builds up meaning with parts, which are also borrowed that the result is not a mix of things, but careful articulations and reformulations of the possibilities of those parts to transmit a creative message.

 Linguistic experimentation without structure, but without being literal, but an interpretation of these motifs. There is no overall logic or a pre-established form. The parts are dominant over the whole. The historir references and parts are manipulated and tested to be inserted through assemblage and redesign within the whole. His imaginative process goes beyond the the iconographic sources which he starts with, and with this excess provides a unique exaltation of the difference.

He chooses ornamentation and details from many sources, especially between Spanish Arabic or even Egyptian with colorful and exotic motifs rather than a clear stylistic idea previously taken. He then changed for a more decisive Gothic style where he was able to include his personal experimentation and be freer to search for his formal solutions.

 -In the case of the Guell Palace, one of his important early works, he chooses many aspects of different stylistic historic architecture motifs, but they are merged specifically on a clear functional arrangement in relation to the narrative and the ideas of the building. In the case of the lower level pillars, clearly a recall of ancient roman architecture of bricks that hold the large structure, as we go up, the columns of the front of the building generate a special double gallery detached from the façade, with Egyptian capitels and gothic arches. The central space has reminiscences of Arabic architecture in spain with reflexion and oriental patterns of light like mosques, in this case recalling a spiritual space with a central dome that functionally would convert the building in a large church by playing the organ or by the simple opening of the golden decorated hidden doors of the altar at the main level which open once a mass is celebrated in the palace.

 Through his work we find moments in which language works indifferent ways, and referents are more present or less visible or that a style is more dominant overall, like the case of the gothic in Sagrada Familia. It is interesting which elements help for this erosion of the stylistic reference.

 -In the case of the Guell Park, I think inspired him a very sophisticated way of reading nature. He developed a very interesting role of a translator a reader and interpreting nature for the expression of the spirit. His interpretation of Nature then works as a blending element in which the problem of continuity with the landscape and both the visual manipulation and interpretation of nature help for those references to blend with other creative inventions, making place for a new language to emerge. What is also interesting is  the way Nature is presented through the work of the park. Not only Nature is exposed, but also exalted, and even framed by the seting up of the colonnades below the garden so that the plants seem to be holded by the columns and that the branching of the columns are the roots of the natural plants. Back and forth not only architecture behaves as nature, but also nature behaves as architecture, so that the limits between artificial and natural are merged into one another.

 A step by step sequence is developed in the project to arrange systematically the symbolic relationship between architecture and nature. A sort of conceptual mirror is set up as an imaginary limit between nature and architecture in which the behavior of one is mirrored into the other, so that they imitate each other. Starting from the undulating earth containment wall that includes moments where columns are distinguished as figures emerging from the wall and hold the plants above as we explained. Then in other moments where a strategy of carving sideways the slope of the hill of the mountain to generate a gallery with tilted columns which emulate irregular angles in the near trees and also the rooted structures of the natural plants above. Third we can also observe other columns on different elevated roads also tilted but with spinning bands around them that merge into the ceiling of that gallery, as if a plant would be wrapping the column around or in architecture terms, as a salomonic baroque twisted column would be distinguishing itself from the context. Finally, the moment in which the park becomes more artificial is where the terrace, a large artificial esplanade is hold by the 86 columns hall that clearly references to early Greek capitels, with Greek spatial proportions of a hypostyle hall. I think that these process are more interesting that the experiences of Horta or Guimard as Art Nuveau movement, that simply imitate natural forms by making the architecture behave as natural elements. Gaudi plays a deeper transformation and risky game by measuring himself directly with nature, in a natural environment, which in the end is less artificial that decorating walls with floral motifs.

 -The other element that plays such important role in vanishing stylistic elements for a new way of building things are the funicular models to study the transfer of load in structures. Gaudí spent ten years working on studies for the design for the Guell Colony Crypt, and developing a new method of structural calculation based on a stereo static model built with cords and small sacks of pellets. The outline of the church was traced on a wooden board (1:10 scale), which was then placed on the ceiling of a small house next to the work site. Cords were hung from the points where columns were to be placed. Small sacks filled with pellets, weighing one ten-thousandth part of the weight the arches would have to support, were hung from each catenaric arch formed by the cords. Photographs were taken of the resulting model from various angles, and the exact shape of the church's structure was obtained by turning them upside-down. Gaudí took photographs from various angles so he could see vertical sections or elevations of the building. This was a real revolution in architecture design, because of the new paradigm it represented for art experimentation due to the performative aspect of the thing. There is a direct abstract representation, but that because itreally carries weight and each elelment is represented in scale in relation to its weight, then the element is not only a representation in scale of a larger object, but also an object with physical qualities in itself. These inventive constructions offer scale ways to actively and experimentally design by the performance of these models, which offer certain restriction like offering an homogenous reading or tool for the buildings. The mirror to look at the result upside down as a logical way to express tectonic on an opposite relatonship is also a direct a fresher way to work with tectonics.

 -On the latest cases of his career like the Pedrera or Mila house and Batlo houses are complete modern examples of the evolution of his architecture, with new motifs, new spatial conceptions and depurated language with no textual historic references, but focused on the problematic Gaudi was concentrated on, like continuity, fragmentation and completely different from the dwellings developed before like the first works for Guell like his Palace, el Capricho or the other posterior dwellings of Vincens house or the Bellesguard house in which we still have those fragments referring to the composite articulation of different styles.

 -The craft of his early work developed in the furniture that is so interesting in the articulation of continuous difference and ergonomics, emulating bones, the human body and articulations of iron and other materials.

 What is also interesting is that from his strong rejection in Barcelona, he was all of a sudden praised and respected, like his own work changed from non understanding to validation. 

DESCRIBE GAUDI’S UNIQUE TILE CREATIONS, WHAT MATERIALS DID HE USE.

Dadaist. Joseph Maria Jujol was his collaborator. Ceramic creations.

The tiles techiniqe is named trencadis which is the broken pieces of tiles which enable to follow the complex changing geometry of the surfaces they are attached to.

 Tiles: material possibility and the unique formal creation to adapt to such difficult shapes. The breaking of the tile allows for these pieces to accommodate to irregular shapes. These unique formal expression is today similar to a pseudo-decostructivism, an architecture movement started in the 70s, in which one could also apply some of the phrases like “construction with destruction”, that is to say construction with fragments or pieces of another order as opposed to complete orders of logic.

The process of destruction as a copositive motif is also present in this problematic. The openness of the unfinished the unresolved and the value of the fragment, is a logic that is also found in the broken tiles strategy.

Destruction for construction. Fragments are constitutive parts of the work, and they compose the world. Ideology of his work, the world is not made on one thing, but many fragmented parts.

TELL ME ABOUT THE LIZARD AND THE MOSAIC STYLES/WHERE DID HE GET THE IDEA FOR THE FOUNTAIN - WHY DO YOU THINK IT'S BECOME A SYMBOL OF BARCELONA.

 First I should say it is not a lizard, but a Dragon, Python, the guardian of the Subterranean Waters. I think this is a very interesting question. It is double significance because it represents what the eye cannot see and that makes all of the working systems of the park possible. The regulation of 2500 gallons of water that makes the water for the fountains, the vegetation, etc.

 We should talk about icon. It is interesting that after so many formal acrobats the fountain becomes from a field of movement a distinguishable iconic shape, similar to a lizard, appearing from the sculpture, the fountain and the steps going down.

 The city aopted the dragonsculpture as an icon of the relationship between nature and art in Guadi’s Park Guell, where the guardian takes care of the ifrastructure the things people do not see. Metaphore of the water below which keeps all of us alive.

 TELL ME ABOUT THE HOUSE HE LIVED IN ON THE PROPERTY - DID HE DESIGN IT?

 In 1905 he moved to the park to live there, with his father and his niece, in a house made by his colleague and friend Beringuer. Nowadays the house is a Gaudi-museum. Shortly afterwards his father died. Francesc Gaudí Serra (1813-1906) .

 This change in attitude may have been caused by a series of events that took place beginning in 1912. That year, his niece, Rosa Egea, who lived with him in Barcelona, died. In 1914, his faithful collaborator, Francesc Berenguer Mestres, died, and for matters of professional fees, he was confronted with the Milà family in litigation. In 1915, the continuity of the construction of the Sagrada Familia was endangered by a serious economic crisis. En 1914, construction of the Colonia Güell was definitively interrupted. Two years later, his friend, Doctor Torras i Bages, Archbishop of Vic, died. In 1918, his best friend and patron, Eusebi Güell, passed away. They were sad events that affected him but did not limit his energy and desire to see his greatest work, the Sagrada Família, come into being.

TELL ME A BIT ABOUT THE MAN GAUDI WAS... WHAT INSPIRED HIM?

Gaudi the Man

The young Gaudi was very well connected in the beginning of his life, less related to conservative environments and less catholic. He was a dandy who was also agnostic, while these might be different characteristics of his strong personality. He then became more influenced by the ideals of his patrons Guell, Mila, Batlo. Cooperative ideals, sensibility for the intellectual conflicts but also his mystic force and passion are neither theoretic nor trivial, but was trying to incorporate the contradictions of his time. As he then became more influenced by the spiritual counceling of the Bishop in charge of Sagrada Familia, he found his way on concentrating on his work and his own spirituality, segregated completely from any reality or social life. 

When Gaudí comes to work at Sagrada Família he is 31, and up to that age apparently not at all religious. But we can't say, as some pretend, that he had been anti-clerical because, among other things, he wouldn't have been accepted by Josep Maria Bocabella, a devout Catholic.

What is certain, is that at that age Gaudí experiences a conversion of heart through the remarkable influence of Bishop Grau from Reus, a friend of the family and bishop of Astorga, and also through the great impact of his friendship with Enric d'Ossó (later canonised). As a result of this conversion, Gaudí starts attending daily Mass; he begins to read the Bible every day. He also has a spiritual director, a priest from the Saint Philip Neri Oratory in Gracia, who leads him, via a profound grasp of the liturgy, into the depths of the Christian faith. Gaudi's bedside reading is Beranger's Anné Liturgique which centres on the liturgy of the Easter mystery.

 He also chooses to adopt the lifestyle of a very poor man; becoming almost like a monk in Barcelona. He was one of the most famous architects in the city and could, therefore, have lived as a rich man. He worked on many other assignments simultaneously with Sagrada Família, but this became his great personal project, with a clear objective: for the visitor to come away impressed by God's saving work. Deeply impressed himself, Gaudí often explained his work with tears in his eyes.

 As he then became more influenced by the spiritual counceling of the Bishop in charge of Sagrada Familia, he found his way on concentrating on his work and his own spirituality, segregated completely from any reality or social life.

 He then lived in very poor conditions. He lived secluted from what was the city per say at the time. Like a monk, retired and just thinking about architecture.  

He became more secluded into his personal beliefs, spirituality and introversive attitude in the search for that truth he deeply believed in.

When Count Güell also died, he came to live in a corner of his workshop next to the Crypt of Sagrada Familia by 1925. He dressed so shabbily, that when he was run down by the tram on June 10, 1926, at the intersection of Gran Via and Bailen, - on his way back from his daily prayers at the Cathedral - the person who picked him up from the ground thought that the tram had run over a beggar. He took him to the city's hospital for the poor in Carrer Hospital (Hospital Street) close to the Ramblas, and left him among the indigent sick. The following day, he was found there by the priest who lived with him. Two days later, he died from his injuries.

 The last 12 years of his life Gaudi dedicated himself totally to the construction of the Sagrada Familia. In his personal life he seems to turn his back more and more on the earthly world and turns more to the spiritual world which is clearly visible in the building activities at the cathedral. On June, 7th 1926 he is overrun by a tram and 5 days later he dies. Nobody had recognised him on the street and was neglected for the first few days in the hospital. 

Gaudí died at the age of 74 (June 12, 1926), but if it hadn't been for the tram he may have lived many more years, since his father had lived to the age of 93, with all his vigor. Half of Barcelona dressed in black to give final homage to a man that had become very popular, although few had ever met him personally. His body was buried in the crypt of the edifice where he had worked for the last 43 years of his life, the Sagrada Familia. 

He died and nobody recognized him in the street. He was a Saint for me, and the Catholic Church approved the first stage into making him officially a Saint. The beatification process by John Paul II started in 2000. But this admiration for Gaudi´s 'sainthood', although out of proportion to the admiration for his genius as an artist, goes back even to the time of his life. At the time of his death - knocked over by a tram - the press, in the reports and articles written by respected citizens (intellectuals, artists and ecclesiastics), outlined that he who had died was 'a genius and a saint'. The burial - they say - was a popular manifestation of homage to the man who lived the poverty of the Gospel, who was in love with God, and who had expressed, in stone, the mysteries of God's salvation. He also chooses to adopt the lifestyle of a very poor man; becoming almost like a monk in Barcelona. He was one of the most famous architects in the city and could, therefore, have lived as a rich man.

 CONTEXT - INSPIRATION

In order to talk about Gaudi, one should be Catalonian, or from Barcelona. I will make my best in order to asset a right perspective about such a man like Gaudi without making big mistakes. 1852-1926 Barcelona and Gaudi: You cannot separate them. There is a search for an autonomous and unique language of expression, but also elitist of its society. The new dynamism of the growth of the city made it became a chaotic dynamic shift of continuous change. The new environment, is distant from nature and becomes competitive and aggressive.  The Catalonian Modernisme adquired a kind of symapty because of its surreal sensibility. Gaudi had a critical attitude, uncertain but becomes concrete as his work ius developed. The He develops an utopian religious social attitude in relation to the metropolitan illusion. He introduces within a critical and transcendent attitude.  The context of the architecture evolution is of renovation and change from the classical cannons dominant in Europe. The first solution is the eclecticism, a reaction to any cannon in which the multiplicity of styles is in search for a new style that liberates the culture from the heavy classic of the renaissance. Because everything is about wondering of the origins of culture, the natural question was to wonder about the certainties for the classical architecture and revise the qualities of the gothic, for instance. Why was it that the positive aspects of the medieval architecture were forgiven? The gothic is seen as the opposite face of classic architecture, signifying also a motivation for a subliminal dimension for architecture. Construction, economy and symbolic aspects of that style are given a chance of returning, especially in programs all around Europe involving the spiritual rituals. The search for a new inedited style, genuine and new, was the final aspiration of the architects of the time, on this new, positive, scientific and industrial time.

 But the position was a critical one, a rational illuminist position in which the past solutions were all a matter of revision and change, adaptation and update in relation to the new construction methods, materials resistance, archeological discoveries and the new possibilities. There were great masters that played important references to Gaudi, such as the French professor an architect Violet Le-Duc. He fostered the solution of the right architectural problem from the material selection to each particular detail, and further from any stylistic solution, the new search involves a research on the methodic technical and scientific means of construction. Combinations of caste iron structures with stone are innovative ideas, which give architecture a sensation of lightness and purity as well as more illumination and openness. Gothic is the referent style for this architecture, which influences Gaudi. Berlage in Amsterdam, Victor Horta in Brussels, Guimard in Paris are followers of Le-Duc, and all of them produce innovative ideas in relation to the structure and as a result of the entire composition of their buildings. The Catalunian Modernisme was similar to other metropolis movements such as Art Nuveau, Jugendstil, Sezession, Liberty, Floreale, etc.

 WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PART/DESIGN OF THE PARK AND WHY?

 The plaza above the colonnade, and then discovering that there is such a field or a forest of columns below. The terrace presents a segregated contrasted plane that clearly detaches itself from the irregular slope of the mountain, and due to its oversized excessive dimensions makes one think of a surreal space. That contrast between openness and infinite (clam, metaphoric and celestial space) over Barcelona and looking towards the Mediterranean Sea, the towers of Sagrada Familia, that openness and going down and discovering what supports that free platau: an inmense human effort, a deep and dark space of nonsense compression and repeated motifs of saturated field of columns. It is like a heaven and hell relationship, so simple so deep. You really feel that you are in a special place over that terrace, even functionally it is so complex. It has many parts, many individual pieces that very carefully compose a whole, a beautiful whole which is open. While below there is no difference, it is an homogeneous space full of columns that becomes a paranoid space of nonsense craziness and compression (market). This surface it is not just a roof, once one realizes it is sitting over those columns, but it is a floor, a floor of something else, something that is the presence of a certain kind of absence that is there. Originally a market place for the colony and example of antiquity, and a theatre. 258 feet by 120 feet. Half of it is built over solid ground; the rest is over the Doric columns.

 The thematization of the horizon is also a powerful way to articulate the meaning of this gigantic elevated artificial plateau looking towards the sea. A significant piece of concrete, that being planar and elevated on the mountain, measures the landscape around it, by transforming it.

The articulation element is an ergonomic profile of siting person extruded along the side of the terrace, generating a large curvilinear bench, probably designed by Joseph Jujol his apprentice.

 WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE OF THE PARK IS?

 Multifuctional place for observing, meeting like any park, like Central Park if you eliminate the sports activities. A place for meditation, meeting, talking and  walking. A park for the city of Barcelona.

 WHY DO YOU THINK GAUDI'S CREATIONS ENDURE.

 Because they are deep in thought and they are works on the constant problems of the human being.

The park was declared a universal monument by UNESCO in 1984, along with two more works by the brilliant architect. Also we may consider that the Batlo House was adquired recently, around 2002 by 120 million dollars, an amount largely paid due to the artistic qualities of this work of architecture, for the first time that I know of a building is paid because of its intellectual conceptual artistic qualities rather than because of its covered surface or location.

 His work remains open and full of contradictions. One may even say that his work opens up purposely problems of contradiction in architecture, through spatial reference iconographic recall, stylistic reference that by displacements and assemblage and collage make contradictions have a narrative, a sense of a deep architectural problems. The unfinished condition of the Sagrada Familia and the Guell Colony Crypt because of density allowed that work to remain open rather than close. Open to questioning and not to turn it down. His works remains too contradictory for him to be considered on e of the first modern architects. I think he was on a certain way. Displacing architecture concept of scale, style and form into a very non orthodox way of colliding them on a unity. Forced unity of the fragments in which everything can also be consider to be put together on a problematic way. His work was also unique. A personal adventure of his unique genius. His work also intends to understand itself, understand the material of the work generated and pull ot forward on a different way. An excess of a certain kind, which propagates even more creativity. There is so much motivation on the parts that they express that motivation and surprise to you. His buildings are an open sourse of creative material, wherever you look at there is something else, at many levels.

 His extended talent, exuberant creativity that took over everything is encountered, according to some important authors consumed him too. I hardly agree with this perspective since I think his creativity had no chance other that letting is express itself without control. There is not a calm down Gaudi, you cannot stop the creativity of such a genius, you just let him go.

 It is true that his genius demanded a significant effort and this became a sort of a symbol. Therefore many of his work remain unfinished. But because of that exhaustive creativity and density of interesting problematic very well resolved, his work has such a power that it is difficult to consider to be something lost or not finished, rather I like to think of something that remains open to interpretation and thinking. Sagrada Familia is an example of an unfinished work. He knew will never finish, but also reinforced the idea that will be an open organism in which the city itself should always provide material to. Like the old medieval cathedrals the work of many generations would keep the spirit of the city alive. Each person could provide its own stone to the construction. The reason it is such a good work of him, allowed for this work to remain open and active. He gave life to architecture for as much as it remains unfinished, no one would turn it down because of that density of creativity. Therefore this unfinished condition is very critical and interesting on his behalf and a way to perpetuate himself over his time. The other case is the chapel for the Guell Colony, which he could only finish the crypt for. The density and the effort put on the design of the parts is such, that as an organism in the search of its central organization remains alive, formally as if the parts are individual creatures that are making the effort of generating such a tensed centrality. This has a deep formal work on natural forms and the complexity of the elements and the relationship with the whole. The issue of centrality is present in the European architecture, but in this case, where there is never a preset typology for the project, there is a constant titanic effort in by giving the fluidity to the parts and a set of organic relationships that the building seems to propose in its analogy to a live organism. There is an inherent expressed contradiction in this process where the apparently dislocated pieces of the building produces and effect of a destructive construction.

 It more like an inverse linguistic deconstruction, whereas instead of deconstructing an existing structure to reformulate the structure, that structure is broken into pieces so that the result is a special kind of fragmentation of orders or structures that compose a strange kind of diverse work, rather than a unity. The idea of unity is highly criticized continuously, with the exception of Sagrada Familia, where the narrative of the different scales of symbolism of the Church cannot fragment the sophisticated idea of unity of an idea of message about the Bible. This is special occasion in which there is a worked sense of unity and where the parts even if they are independent messages and symbols there are arranged and transformed so that they turn into a larger idea. The parts are independent and each have a diversification from the unity or the center, but they recognize that presence.

 In this idea of deconstructing an existing symbol, to appropiate its meaning into a different context, distorting the cannon of scale, size andlocation, allow Gaudi to generate a method which is highly modern in its conceptual level. The idea of transfiguration through architecture specific tools of transformation, like scale, enables him to manipulate architecture language through different displacements, and therefore achive a different meaning. He is very close to generate a completely new language out of the combination of fragmented quotations and specific displacements and articulations of those fragments, but at the same time, and due to the special historical context and as everybody else was looking for a new style, he did as far as the culture of the time allowed him to do, and made his important collaboration for the Modern times to come, and the change to start happening. He was very modern in his procedure, methodology and transformation, but because of the use of quotations as material to work with, it did not completely enable him to liberate from the past, rather to refer to it on a special modern way. Many architects in moments of transformation had a similar challenge, to anticipate ways of working but with the language available at the time. Brunelleschi, one of the first Renaissance architects worked with the gothic language to express the new renaissance ideas of perspective that were coming to transform the concepts of space. In Gaudi many things are proto-modernist, like the continuity and fluidity between spaces, that is a work that could have taken even further, but that started in a way with his work, as we can observe at the Guell Palace in the central space.

  WHAT'S THE BEST, MOST UNIQUE THING ABOUT GAUDI'S DESIGNS - WHAT ABOUT HIS ART INSPIRES YOU?

 Guell Park together with the Guell palace even if it is not a mature work as the park or Sagrada Familia are. The Guell palace with the central space, but also the programmatic complexity and simultaneity of being a palace and both a church at the same time, by just opening two big doors on the main space which is in reality the opening of a hidden altar for private adoration. Together with the organ embedded into this wall next to the hidden altar, the performance of the social event of the mass at Guell palace every Sunday was a way of interpreting these two functions into a spatial experience and unity. Then the incomprehensive presence of the dome into a domestic environment potentially gives enormous power once those doors opens and the ceremony takes place together with the strong sound of the organ which gives sound to the entire palace due to the extent of the pipes that go all the was to the terrace. The domestication of this private and public activities of praying on the one hand and celebrating the mass on the other makes this space but the entire palace an incredible complex hybrid building, where spaces and programs are over-layed and mixed with an cohesive harmony generated by that main space.

FORMAL There is a sensibility between the macrocosm and the microcosm joins, producing a kind of illusion of dilatation and infinity in the mechanism of simultaneous subdivision and hierarchy. There is no structure in his work , it os the opposite to any previous architecture style or methodology in which the whole comprehensive organization of the building sets up from top-down the possibilities of the minor parts to respond to that organization or bigger ideas of composition. His architecture is set up as an organism antagonist to these way thinking. There is though a structure that pt things together as it is with the transferring of loads, but the parts remain highly independent but connected, montage at the same time. Alternative changes in scale, color, and form are strategies to bring stylistic referents to the building without literal quotation. A heavily changed creative symbolic imagination and construction techniques allow him to keep a high level of consistency but also surprise throughout the buildings.

There is a rupture of the overall composition; a classical academic linguistic architectural cannons, to value the fragments.

There is continuity in the relationship between certain type of spaces, but this continuity does not play an overall organizating feature. There is a play of this plasticity, like in the case of the Guell Palace central space, as the space develops up.

Displacement as a technique highly reinforced in modern architecture, was one of his sensibilities. His historic allusions, repeated symbolisms from an eclectic formulation. But Gaudi sets himself apart from these stable architecture stylistic motifs and codes by working out systematic and intuitive creative displacements. For instance he perversely displaces scale, format, construction solutions in pulling apart of the pieces or in the details which do not refer any longer to the original established referents by seting up change and novelty, fostering the unpredicted. These operations help for that surrealist sensibility.

Coherence does not represent in Gaudi a way of organizing his buildings. Instead the an iconographic collage of different architectural materials, apparently separated and dissonant but articulated on a very creative way, without hiding the accidents of this process by harmonizing them with other contiguous problems and making profit and the psychological impact of the surprise.

 His language his sintaxis is the one of destruction. Destruction for construction. Parts destroy any possible whole because they remain so strong and dissonant. There is no process of composition, but a step by step process of accommdation, dislocation and even chaos.

 The other formal method of the inverted funicular of loads defines the form of the Guell Colony church. An experimental method that as a networked set of wires the system responds by itself at any point. This method enabled him to design as a totality, as a whole a series of relationships that were regulated by loads. Because of the homogeneity of the system, as an active tool of this diagram, everything becames more similar to each other, probably not allowing for the fragments to have such a presence. There is a notion of homogeneity and structural continuity, but at the reality of the building this continuity will be fragmentded by the presence of materials and articulations and the expression of certain elements.

 Technology

What is important to note is that materials and technology plays an important role on Gaudi’s innovative ideas. The fact that any part of the building can propose an independent agenda from the whole is worked out in relationship with the rest through material techniques and detail resolutions of montage which also enables him to maintin a cohesive totality with such a change of stylistic referents. In this case technology and structural research kept him also updated with the possibilities of his time. The funicular chains that develop scalar relationships between diagrammatic models and real performative experiments that enabled him to form special solutions for arches and branching out loads in his buildings.  

 

Materials play also an important role in the aspect of his spaces; he uses Mediterranean and Arabic techniques of finishing in the treatment of the floors and furniture in order to give a sensation of fantasy and unreality in the spatial environment.

End of research. 2006

Produced from information from different Spanish resources, Ignasi de Sola Morales, Gaudi book Ed. Tashen.