Gaudi

Antoni Gaudi and his architecture is part of the fame of Barcelona. There are multiple buildings spread throughout the city that were designed by him.

Probably the most famous one is La Sagrada Familia, or the Sacred Family in English. It's a massive church that hasn't been completed even yet. It was the last thing Gaudi was working on when he died from a tram accident.

His architecture style was a bit surrealistic. He claimed he modeled everything after nature, so he disliked straight lines. Curves and twists are everywhere in his designs. From my point of view, I'd just guess he was probably doing shrooms or acid. That's a joke of course. If you look at his buildings you can tell there were some calculations done to make sure they stood up.

His style was groundbreaking for the period that he lived in. He helped to bring in the modern era of art.

At Sagrada we just walked around it to see the different sides, and then went inside, took a look inside and then declined to pay more to go up one of the elevators. In the basement there was a decent museum which we enjoyed walking through.

Park Guell was an area where Gaudi was planning to build a small city, but ran out of funding. The buildings there look like something out of a fantasy movie, although there aren't that many of them. The view at the top of the park is nice.

In La Pedrera, there was an attic area with arches that you could walk over on the roof side. The roof scene was totally funky. We took lots of pictures from up there as well. The attic area held a lot of information about how Gaudi created his sketches. He would model his catenary arches by hanging chains upside down and then viewing them in a mirror to see them right side up. That way he could see how to perfectly counter gravity.

I just gandered at the outside of Casa Batllo because it looked pretty but I did not want to pay the $25 admission to go in and look inside another Gaudi building.

If you look up close at his works, you can tell he was a genius, although a kooky one. The detail that he's applied to each of his works is amazing. Everytime I turned around and looked back, I discovered something new in the scene that I hadn't seen before.

I think it was his genius that amazed his fans, but it was his kookiness that made him really popular.