Saturday Feb 9, Part 2

After touring every part of the house and even riding its elevator, we walked down Passeig de Gràcia (the street of Casa Batlló) and saw another of Gaudi’s houses, Casa Mila. We only saw this one from the outside, since the entrance fee was pretty steep and we had just paid to see Casa Batlló. Casa Mila was an apartment complex built between 1906 and 1912, with the Mila family living on the bottom floor. Very cool façade. Look:

From Casa Mila we took the Metro to the stop for Sagrada Familia, the massive church designed by Gaudí (it was a Gaudí-heavy day). Construction began on the church in 1882, and the next year Gaudí was appointed project director. He worked on the building from then until his death in 1926 (we was hit by a tram and while wearing shabby clothes and had empty pockets, and cab drivers wouldn’t take him to a hospital because they thought he couldn’t pay the fare. Nobody realized it was Gaudí until the next day). Only eight of the twelve bell towers of the façade have been built, though they’re absolutely amazing at over 100 metres each. The church has three facades, the Passion, the Glory and the Nativity. All the sculpted figures on the façade of the Passion look like cubist style, really chunky and blocky. In contrast, the figures on the façade of the Nativity look almost baroque. The façade of the Glory is smaller than the other two and features tons of animals, like giant snakes and snails. Inside almost everything, from the rose window to the vaulted ceiling, is geometrical, which is a really interesting effect for such a massive building. There are also naturalist elements, specifically that some of the columns resemble trees that Gaudí saw from his workshop window. The ceilings inside are amazing – they’re SO far off the ground it’s dizzying, and the pamphlets about the church all say that the circular flower-looking decorations are modeled on parabolic hyperboloids. Ah, the beauty of a properly executed parabolic hyperboloid.

This is the facade of the Passion. Ahhhhhhhhh sooo tall, it's amazing. Keep in mind a lot of the ground is cut out of this shot.

The facade of the Nativity. So ornate it looks like it's made of lace, and the spires are almost as tall as the ones on the facade of the Passion; I'm just so close to the building here that you can't tell.

The facade of the Glory. If you click on this photo it should enlarge and if you look closely at the line where the sunlight meets the shadow, you can see some of the animals like the giant snakes and snails. I think there's an alligator too.

A shot inside the cathedral, looking up at the ceiling. Parabolic hyperboloids aplenty. Sooo tall. This shot had less scaffolding than most...the whole structure has been under construction since 1882, obviously.