Psychogeography

Pink, Fluffy Barcelona

Everyone loves Gaudí, no? The last time I was in Barcelona, having four hours to kill between work engagements and no knowledge of the city at all, I asked my hostess to take me to the cathedral. In fairness to her she was only doing the right and literal thing when she took me to La Catedral de la Seu, the city’s Gothic pile. But of course I meant Gaudí’s masterpiece, La Sagrada Família, the melting-candle towers of which I could see over the urban hugger-mugger, once I ascended to the rooftop in a moderately priced lift.

This time there were to be no such confusions. No sooner had my thirteen-year-old daughter and I checked into our hotel on Avenue Paral-lel than we dived back into the metro. Together with whole legions of other teenage girls we converged on those phallic spires, our hearts full of joy, our squeaky voices still squeakier with enthusiasm — as if we had inhaled helium mixed with laughing gas.

Because everyone loves Gaudí: no other architect has impressed his vision as vitally on a major city as the Catalonian trickster has on Barcelona. Is it too weird to suppose that he knew what he was up to with his sinuous curves, his natural fractals, his hallucinogenic mushrooms, his flower petals and his lingams? That even a century ago Gaudí could descry the future and saw a dark blue sky, close to the end of history, across which snaked the spermy contrails of a myriad low-cost airlines? Planes that would bring to his beloved city a vast — and yet representative — sample of young, global womanhood?

For what is contemporary Barcelona, in the holiday season, save a gigantic urban sorority? So feminising is the tendency of Gaudí’s sinuous curves that they gather into themselves an thousand, thousand orthodontically challenged, navel-pierced, Justin Timberlake fans, all of them gum-chewing, twittering, preening and prancing to the tinny beat of their iPods. I felt this great tide of femininity at the very core of my being, and found myself almost surfing on its current of hormones, felt my breasts swell and my lingam shrivel to the dimensions of a mere architectural detail.

But back to the unfinished cathedral: everyone loves Gaudí, no? Loves the idea that La Sagrada Família is the truest of modern Gothic, in its praxis if not its form. For, unlike contemporary, flat-pack edifices, this staggering stalagmite of a building has been dripped into existence over decades, a slow accretion handed down from Gaudí daddy to Gaudí son in much the same way that the great medieval cathedrals were built. Inside its tracery of gushing buttresses — which spurt skywards in a dense cage of scaffolding — you feel this praxis intently, a highly sexual stridulation of steel rubbing against stone.

Yes, everyone loves Gaudí, except that close up La Sagrada Família is just a little bit. . Well, what is the mot juste. .? Just a little bit ugly. That’s it. Because the holy figures on the façade have the Cubist features not of angelic beings but of that crude puppet once used to advertise Cuprinol wood preservative (a puppet which, bizarrely, was kidnapped and held to ransom, but that’s another story). And the flying buttresses that stretch from this façade into the forecourt: well, perhaps it’s the presence of entire herds of heifers chewing their latex cud, but they are rather reminiscent of Wrigley twists between girlish teeth. And the finials, spires and pinnacles of the sacred edifice (a building likened by a contemporary of Gaudí’s to a ‘pile of chicken giblets’): while their bright colours and fruity form, and their incorporation of traditional Catalan mosaic, give them a certain trippy quality, this is not the artificial paradise of a Baudelaire or a Coleridge, but an altogether more cuddly noumenal realm.

Don’t get me wrong: everyone loves Gaudí — and I’m no exception. La Sagrada Família wins me over with its sheer wantonness as a building — this is the Lolita of sacred architecture. But it isn’t until a couple of days later, when we venture further north to the Parc Guell, Gaudí’s botched attempt at building a garden suburb, that the conundrum of his unique vision is finally resolved for me. Yes, it is modernist, yes, he took Art Nouveau and gave it several more twists into the mystical, yet observing the dinky gatehouses of the park, their pie-crust roofs and organic windows, I was reminded, not of anything remotely sublime, but of the kitsch dwellings of those animated Belgian munchkins, the Smurfs. I half expected Father Abraham to emerge from behind one, monstrously large and speaking baby-Walloon.

It is this infantilism that explains why everyone loves Gaudí, I think. This desire we all have to be a pink, fluffy girl in her pink, fluffy bedroom. And in our kidult era, what could be more loveable than a kidult genius of the built environment?