Word: sagrada
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Giralt-Miracle says one aim of the year of conferences, exhibitions, school activities and open days - smaller shows are being negotiated for cities ranging from Berlin, Rome and London to Shanghai and Philadephia - is to go beyond the postcard image of Gaudí's best-known work, the incomplete Sagrada Família cathedral. (Its latest guesstimated finishing date is 2030.) "Today Gaudí is more popular than known, and we want to change that," says Giralt-Miracle. "He had his feet on the ground, but his imagination in the infinite, arriving at a time - the turn of the 19th...
...just possible, however, that this last situation may change. In Barcelona a movement is stirring among the city's Catholic hierarchy to push for the beatification and eventual canonization of Antoni Gaudi I Cornet (1852-1926), designer of the unfinished church of the Sagrada Famolia and the greatest architect that Barcelona, or Spain itself, has ever produced. Back in 1992, the auxiliary bishop of Barcelona, Joan Carrera, called the beatification move "a legitimate and reasonable proposal." In a pastoral letter last Aug. 23, Ricard Maria Cardinal Carles declared his intent to begin the long and labyrinthine process toward beatifying...
Gaudi was obsessively pious, especially in his old age. He used to shuffle around the streets of his city nibbling on crusts of bread and seeking alms for the building of the Sagrada Famolia. He hated liberalism and was devoted to everything most penitential and reactionary in Spanish Catholicism. He was gloomy, short-fused, arrogant--the Christian virtue of humility was never his forte--and so misogynistic that he never married and probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly...
...Archbishop of Barcelona begs to differ. He thinks we should beatify one. Ricard Maria Cardinal Carles' candidate is Antonio Gaudi, who could perhaps become the patron saint of highly decorative unfinished projects because although he died in 1926, his most famous work, Barcelona's CHURCH OF THE SAGRADA FAMILIA, is not complete. The archbishop believes that Gaudi had a deep spiritual life. Since architects have long had an image problem, His Eminence may be on to something. How does St. Frank Gehry sound...
...mystery remains. The unpalatable graffiti and tastless toys didn't wreck my vacation, but they did rein in my tendency to describe Barcelona as an urban Magic Kingdom with the Sagrada Familia as its bizarro Space Mountain. I couldn't conduct a poll of city residents and ask them whether they felt more whimsical than other Spaniards, but I'm convinced that Barcelona's smirky attitude is more than mere packaging. Yet it's mixed in with something ugly, and nothing! observed gave me any means of teasing the swagger apart from the dark cloud...