Enjoying Gaudi or the Gaudy Enjoyment

Barcelona is Gaudi. But who was really Gaudi? For the usual historical facts, check the wikipedia or any of the gazillion books about him. I can only tell you what my experiences are about Gaudi.

Despite the immense interest of tourists in his allegedly works, especially among Japanese ones, few people knows the basics about his life, such that he was not really born in Barcelona, but in a masia between Riudoms and Reus, a town south of Barcelona.

Due to some disease that prevented him from any physical effort, he spent part of his childhood alone, riding a tiny donkey to go from one place to another, while chasing dragonflies at the riera de Maspujols, a gravel rambla (ravine) that only carries running water when the llevantada (late summer powerful storms) hits the Tarragona maritime mountain range now and then.

I know the place. It is supposed to be there, where he discovered the marvels of natural shapes, those that some years later he translated into stone and concrete to build the most distinctive buildings of Barcelona. Static movement and self-repeated shapes, the very same patterns of plants, rooted to the ground and growing up to the skies, seeking for nutritional light. That was his interpretation of architecture. What was a building looking for in the skies? Well, since he was a pious guy, that must be god.

My elementary school was located on the place a nun convent used to exist. The only religious remains, though, were a chapel, dark and smelly, crammed with old devoted widows who substituted their long deceased earthly life with ghostly prayers in front of a weird altar. Years later, I discovered that such barbed wired altar had been the very first work of Gaudi while still a student. And it was located by my school? Amazing!

I have always thought that Gaudi's 3D cross on the top of the Casa Batllo looked like a huge garlic or fig. All Gaudi's buildings have crosses on the top, like churches. Some have a Christian motto, like the Pedrera, whose balcony ironwork also resembles a Japanese seaweed called wakame. Even in the Sagrada Familia there are some baskets with fruit. His buildings seems to be vegetable churches that connect earth and heaven.

When he was run over by a tramway, he was thought to be a homeless and send to a charity hospital where a gypsy called Pubill gave him his bed, the last soft one before the cold tombstone of his grave. Was he a genius or just a homeless (lit.)? Is he now a saint, as some people claim (lit.), or a money-making machine for Barcelona? I just think of him as a guy who longed for his childhood chasing grasshoppers and dragonflies near the riverside.