Inefficient for Inefficiency’s Sake: Gaudi’s Fantastical Impracticalities
Just went to see Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 feature documentary on Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. Much less informative than it might have been, the film was, nonetheless, aesthetically rewarding . Hardly any talking, just a slow camera luxuriating on the textures, slopes and intricate designs of this artist’s supercalifragilistic creations. I love Gaudi’s buildings as much for their sheer fantastical impracticality as anything else. But too for their clean humanoid curves and spines, wavy roofs, outlandish sculptures and Sci Fi faces, and for all those wonderfully colourful ceramic chips. Looking at his weird shaped windows and convoluted arched ceilings you just know that anyone with cost-savings on the mind would have headed immediately in the opposite direction. So different from your typical functional downtown building that they stick out in ways that are supremely joyful. As animation might in a regular unanimated film. I’m tempted to compare some of his houses to Mini Mouses’ at Disney in Orlando…but I wont. So beautifully anti-efficient.
Like Andy Goldsworthy’s winding wall at Storm King Art Center in New York State…built around living trees, not straight on top of killed ones. Speaking of surreal, apparently Gaudi’s abandoned plans for a New York skyscraper hotel influenced the redesign of the World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Funny, one thing I won’t forget about my visit to the Sagrada Familia back in 1979: all the sad, unimaginative parishners parroting back all those sad, unimaginative religious incantations in one of the most imaginatively designed buildings known to humankind. And finally, just so we stay on message: The "Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia" (Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family) was the idea of a bookseller, Josep Maria Bocabella. Photo from here