It would have been easier had I simply seen the buildings the first time I visited Barcelona, but on that trip I just got off the train, found a cheap hotel with a vacancy, slept, and got back on a train to Lyon in the morning. I was in a hurry to get to Chamonix, and had no intention of taking time to see anything on the way, and had done no research.

Some of my friends are Gaudi buffs, too, and we've talked about the buildings, particularly the Sagrada Familia. An architect I know agrees that finishing it is a mistake. Gaudi's buildings are sui generis. It took Gaudi himself to show the workmen how to build these things. When you look at them, they are like alien artifacts; the sensibility from which they sprang is so foreign as to be inhuman. By "inhuman" I mean nothing derogatory, only that the originality of these things is beyond anything else I've ever seen. They are so strange that they inspire only looking; one becomes dumb before them.

There is a sense of almost vegetable vitality about their ornamentation - the flourishing of a jungle, but a jungle of ideas, not plants. Saints are crowded up against bomb-holding anarchists. Stalactites, looking like they are rotten and decaying, hang above the cathedral door. In the Parc Guell, there are tiles of all colors crowded chaotically together. And it is also in that park where Gaudi had an assistant seat himself in the unformed cement, leaving the impression of his ass; it's supposed to be a very comfortable place to sit. In Gaudi's work, there is none of the self-imposed consistency that we all exercise constantly and unconsciously. His eclectecism is as extreme as the word salads of a madman. But it is all so exotic that one accepts the bizarre juxtapositions and anachronisms because one feels he doesn't understand the work. So there is no choice but to accept it.

There is in these buildings a sense of abundance, of energy expressing itself. It is the closest human work I have seen to the inexplicable chaos of God's creation itself. Gaudi, like God, does not censor himself. He is willing to try anything. Straight edges and linear, measurable volumes are a hindrance. Even the columns are floral, or angled.

Part II. January 25, 1999.

A lifelike quality is evident everywhere: in the shapes of the columns, in the bulbs adorning the tops of the towers of the Sagrada Familia (and in the nautilus spirals of their interior staircases), abundantly so in all the metal railings and grates and gates (one even shaped like a dragon). I don't know whether this comes from a preference for natural forms, a sense of play, or a disklike of angularity. But there are linear forms in some of his work: the Teresian College could be a child's toy, perfect in the regularity of its facade; and the uniformity of its first-floor lateral corridors recedes in a photograph as regularly as some etching by Escher. The upper floors of the Guell palace are also symmetrical and geometric, but crowned with fanciful, unmatching towers on the roof. Perhaps he couldn't restrain himself.

Not for nothing does the word "gaudy" echo Gaudi's name. (But note: it is probably not derived from his name; this is fortuitous.) When modernism (not Catalan modernisme, but the high modernism of the International School) was in the ascendant, the sort of exuberance (the energy and playfulness) denoted by the word was considered the worst kind of tastelessness, like a Hawaiian shirt. But the austerity of architects like Mies van der Rohe is nothing but a theory, cut off from the vitality of true life. High modernism is nothing but a snob's excuse to scorn the joyful; it is an exercise in barrenness and snobbery, and like any art nourished on ideas without feeling, we have come to see its bankruptcy. Interest in Gaudi has been on the increase for years.

However much I marvel at it, though, I do not love Gaudi's work. Like the greatest jazz or poetry, it hits me in a spot far beyond my likes and dislikes. My personal preferences are irrelevant in something that in some fashion is so complete that it takes on an undeniable life of its own; that becomes a personality. Whatever one says, one ends up simply talking around the mystery that this presence confronts us with. There are many, many things Gaudi has done that I would find aesthetically repellent - in fact, this is an initial, tentative reaction I have to much of his work. But it immediately fades, to be replaced by wonder. I look at Gaudi not to see beauty, but to be confronted by a sense of astonishment, much like the sense of astonishment that erupted unpredictably and often when I was younger, on simply seeing the world around me. Gaudi evokes that same feeling, which I have largely lost in other circumstances.

Part III. February 12, 1999.

Gaudi the man is of little interest to me. Rarely has there been an artist (and that's what he was: an artist whose buildings were his art; they are as plastic, in the original sense of the word, as any painting or sculpture) - rarely has there been an artist whose life and work were such a contrast. A lifelong bachelor, a vegetarian, he lived with his family until they died, one after the other. Then he lived on alone, increasingly shabby. When he was hit by the streetcar that killed him, no one even recognized him. He had little to do. An archconservative, a Catalonian nationalist, he devoted himself to the Sagrada Familia in the final decades of his life. He yearned for the Middle Ages, a time of faith and social order (an order quite in contrast to the exuberance of his facades and rooftops). He was buried in the cathedral that was his greatest work. Now, it is being ruined because the plans were burned by a mob during the Spanish civil war, and the architect who is completing lacks the skill and imagination of Gaudi. Instead of stone, the material is synthetic. I have seen the new work. It is a travesty. Except for the other buildings he left behind, Gaudi is being slowly erased.

I expect never to see the city of Barcelona again, or any of Gaudi's work, and that thought does not bother me in the least. It is enough to have seen it once. I will always remember climbing the spiral staircase in one of the towers of his cathedral, reaching the top, looking out, and being tempted to climb out and touch the ornamentation around and above me. There are moments in any life that are what I think of as openings, when something new is revealed. For me, the encounter with Gaudi was one of these.

Rooftop, Casa Batllo

Turret, Bellesguard

Interior, Casa Battlo