Besides Gaudi, another homebred architect from Barcelona is Enric Miralles. I first heard about him in a second year lecture and never gave much thought since. However after seeing his works in real life, I think he’s a brilliant place-maker.
This cemetary built in 1985 made him famous and led to many high profile commissions in the 1990s. Pity he passed away in 2000 at the young age [for an architect] of 45.
It has certainly broken my preconceptions of a cemetary. It certainly broke mine. Bravo, Miralles! Your work still stood to inspire even after your death.
Another Antoni Gaudi work, the organic nature of his work appears much more fitting in a landscape project.
Jeff meets Tara Reid, sadly I wasn’t there when it happened. Only found out while sorting photographs after I got back to Sydney.
The origina of the much-copied Gaudi lizard, you can find them in souvenir shops all over Barcelona. The rest of the park is made with more humble stones, but still amazing nevertheless.
I sat here a long time observing this thing, wondering if inspiration struck when he was picking up his fork from a bowl of melting cheese.
One of the shrines of modern architecture, I find it immensely fortunate to finally have a tactile experience with this building.
Seeing the Barcelona Chairs in context. The Pavilion was built to host the royal launching “party” and these were suppose to be the thrones. I find it peculiar that we’re not supposed to sit on these chairs.
The only place we could really sit was outside, it’s more comfortable than imagined.
The Forum Barcelona by Herzog & de Meuron. It’s on one end of the Diagonal, which is a very long and straight diagonal road that slices across the city. The other end is the university, where the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura is located. The Torre Agbar is somewhere in them middle.
You can see David, Jeff and me in the reflection of the ceiling lobby underneath the Forum’s main exhibition space. Novel materials and many little places to explore, but oddly this part of town still feels deserted.
Again, Jean Nouvel – one of my favorite architects – and one of his most notorious towers with a crude nickname.
Its normally blu-ish throughout the day, this (badly taken) photo was during sunset. The facade is simply colourful corrugated steel panels with plain old louvres around the entire building.
The Casa Mila, which is also known as the La Pedrera (trans: quarry, in Catalan) was finished in 1907.
This organic theme continues inside, surprisingly very colourful and well-lit.
The roof slab is actually warped! Note Sagrada Familia in the background.
The Casa Batllo is a renovation, so possibly more attention to ornamentation happened here. A fantastic example of Gaudi’s stylised formal and colour mastery in stone, glass and ceramic.
Intended as a Roman Catholic basilica, Gaudi was assigned this project in 1884. He spent 40 years especially the last 15 years of his life working on just this one building, dying in 1926. The thing is, he not only anticipated that it won’t be finished in his lifetime, but projected it’ll take a few hundred years more!
Thanks to computers nowadays, it will be completed in 2026. Yes, that’s not a typo – even with today’s technology his ideas still take an incomprehensible amount of time to realise.
This photo is flipped 180°. In order to resolve the complex load transfers, he hung bags of lead to strings and worked out his geometry upside down.
The studio which he worked, located underneath the church.
There couldn’t be a better time to link to Edgar Gonzalez’s Weblog. He is born Mexican Architect, Mac Maestro, not to mention Jeff’s Tutor Extraordinaire that participated in the ETSAB Summer Workshop.
Very colourful personality. Let’s put it this way, the first time both Jeff and I met him on our walk back to our apartments, we couldn’t believe how *colourful* the words are – coming out from his mouth.
For two weeks I was involved in a workshop that involves students from universities representing five countries, namely France, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil and of course, Australia.
The Faculty Lobby, so many good memories.
Our Studio, I was showing them this website !
Pizza Break.
Sitting around in a Plaza somewhere in Grácia
By the way, we had a football match on the beach. It was France-Brazil-Italy VS Switzerland – Australia. You would think we’re the underdogs but we won!
Lazing on the beach, after the beach soccer match.
Jeff’s group’s outstanding model.
Aftermath, observe the destruction … and peace that ensued …
The Rambla street extends into this development by the sea called the Rambla de Mar. Reminds me of Darling Harbour, with shopping, IMAX theatres and so forth.
This has to be a highlight. The actual Ictineo II built by Monturial in 1862, the first working submarine of the world !! It could dive as much as 90 feet and spend as long as 7.5 hours below water.
As a sidenote, note how the sky is darker in the background. Jeff and I affectionately refer to that as the Mordor effect. Consistently crops up everytime we take photos of landmarks throughout Europe! Backtrack if you don’t believe me!
Barcelona’s beach did not exist before the 1992 Olympics. After much hype, I must say the sand is really bad. Hard to explain, kinda like dusty and coarse at the same time.
August 26, 2005 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Food, Spain
I’m already a huge fan of paella ever since first trying it in Sydney 10 years ago.
By the way, I love saying PAELLA. It’s pronounced PA-EH-YAH, not PA-EH-LAH.
There is Jeff’s vegetarian paella, my seafood paella, and two tapas dishes – Potatoes in Catalan garlic sauce and sauteed mushrooms.
By the way I came across this supercool Prawn thing. It’s about the size of a tiger prawn but has a hard outer shell. Tastes like a cross between lobster and prawns. Anyone shed some light on this? Any marine biologists out there??
Black Paella, made from ink squid !! A trivia for you, does it still come out black on the other end?
We got off the seaport and tried to catch taxis. But EVERY single one of them just stopped and took off when we showed them the address. Am I going to a really seedy part of town?
Later a local explained that we arrived at 2PM sharp, which means lunchtime for them. NO ONE works during lunch time. From 2PM to 4PM, absolute standstill. The whole city just shuts down for two hours.
Our Hostel – Gat Xino Hostal
Really funky place. Feels queasy waking up in the morning, crawl your way to the toilet that’s totally GREEN.
The Famous La Rambla of Barcelona
Extremely lively street, feels like a carnival. Apparently the Rambla started off more than a main street, it’s also the main “drain” of the Old Historical centre.
So it was designed so that all branching streets will dump their water there.
This street performer made a full outfit just from plastic bottles. Very ecological …
We’ve never really gave this part of the trip a name. So just wrote it as The Great Crossing in our schedule and name stucked somehow. It’s the bit where we cross the whole European continent along the Mediterranean in one trip, from Istanbul to Barcelona.
We started off with a flight from Istanbul to Rome via Turkish Airlines. Pretty much a non-event because I was so flat out tired from the Conference.
When we got to Rome, the Airport “Express” was late and drove us nuts. Fortunately in a very Italian way, the train to Civitavecchia (Rome’s seaport) was late as well so it worked out.
This is one big chuck of a ferry. More like a cruiser but not really a luxury liner. It’s like a four star hotel on water with propellers. It was a good break cruising for two days on the Mediterranean.
First off, I want to say the THE VIDEOS ARE FIXED, GO BACK AND SEE THEM !!
I had just finish the longest singular route for my whole trip, flying halfway across Europe from Istanbul to Rome, then a ferry from Rome to Barcelona, a trip that took two days. My brain is tripping a little, which I really have to sort out because my Barcelona workshop begins tomorrow!!
Which brings me to how I will maintain the blog from now on. It’s pretty silly to update my studio stuff here, since this page is for “bringing Europe to you”. So I may post more culturally general stuff, like Tastebuds. Anyway, it also means less frequent updates in the coming days. I will resume my “backpacking” on the 28th of July by going to Helsinki in Finland, it will return to normal then.
This is also the only time I have to give the website a face-lift and possibly fill-in stuff like, a minimap of where I’ve been etc. We’ll see how we go, adios !!
