Word: barcelona
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...second boom occurred at the height of Barcelona's industrial prosperity and misery, between 1860 and 1910. Its main frame, the huge grid of chocolate- square blocks that stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Collserola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place...
...Barcelona was the place where Picasso studied, where Salvador Dali grew up, and out of whose deeply conservative traditions of family and rural life Joan Miro, Catalunya's greatest painter since the 14th century, was able to fashion an art of the most radical poetry. And the best buildings constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled...
...Monet, sparkling with drifts of blue and green mosaic. Nor should one miss the iron dragon gate of the Finca Guell, or the crypt of the Colonia Guell -- the chapel of an industrial community for weavers at Santa Coloma de Cervello, half an hour's drive from Barcelona -- or the Parc Guell, with its ravishing Hansel-and-Gretel pavilions and its undulating benches covered in their mosaic of broken tiles; or, of course, the Sagrada Familia...
...Sagrada Familia (which is not a cathedral but an "expiatory temple" dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family) is Gaudi's best-known building, the logo of Barcelona as the Statue of Liberty is of New York City. Unfortunately, because most of its designs were lost in the Spanish Civil War, nobody knows how Gaudi would have finished it, and the newly completed sections look dead compared with the parts Gaudi supervised. The facade sculptures by Josep Subirachs are particularly inert and vulgar. They seem to epitomize the moment when the religious art of Catholic Europe died for want...
Puig, a brilliant eclectic, produced some of the signature buildings of Barcelona. One is the Casa Amatller, next to Gaudi's Casa Batllo, a fecund parody of a Dutch burgher's housefront, with mock-medieval sculptures by the gifted Eusebi Arnau -- including animals blowing glass and taking photos, these having been the owner's hobbies. Another is Puig's exquisitely decorated house for the Baron Quadras, now a museum of musical instruments; a third, the Venetian-Gothic Casa Marti, housed the center of Barcelona's artistic bohemia, the Four Cats cafe, where established artists like Ramon Casas hobnobbed with younger...