Gaudí is not looking for an apartment in Barcelona
In 1911 Gaudí (not a local brunch) had a long conversation with brucellosis. Better known as "undulating fever" (Montaigne? Potatoes? Surfing?), the disease nearly left him unemployed. The architect sweated out the obligatory bacon in a sanatorium in Puigcerdà. In this high-altitude dialogue between life and death, he glimpsed the Passion façade of the Sagrada Familia. The cross, pain, death. Like Jesus. Like Anthony about to fly off to heaven, or hell. But does this suffering, exuding spirit and skin, mean it wasn't for Barcelona?
Every era dreams of the next. Gaudí was in the bathtub of suffering, and the writer Xavier Alemany delimits the Vision of the future city. Look at the seer's ball from 1911: "I have seen the New City, the City of the present, the not even remotely dreamy city in the last few days. The immense Barcino is expansive and wide in proportions beyond measure. There are no Llobregat and Besòs. Saltant per damunt dels rius They are along the coast from Montgat to Garraf and are the extreme neighborhoods of Montcada, Rubí, Vallcarca and Olesa de Bonesvalls. Among houses and green public buildings, parks and forests and gardens and meadows, everything is new: institutions, governments, costs. wars do not exist Armies: neither militarism nor anti-militarism. The International Directing Committee has eliminated Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory with a plumb line. There are no cults or religions. There are no clericals or anti-clericals. No one thinks of dying; everyone yearns to live. This is the new City: the empire of Life. The people work: the master is the City. The neighbors without distinction every day do their task: two hours of occupation that modern machinery has turned into a pleasant, simple, and light distraction... everyone is supported and there are no social classes." All ideal, pure, unsurpassable, marvelous... Thanks to psychotropic drugs.
"Morpheol, the marvelous drug of the 20th century, the supreme achievement of pharmacological chemistry, was finishing off its effects. I was gently slipping away; little by little I felt the return of life. Where was I? Where was I? I didn't know." The narcotic as a Barcelona brand. All unreal. Fictional. Imaginary. But Arcadia goes down the slide of dystopia. Barcelona Sleeping Beauty Narcotic. She no longer wakes up from the poison and always believes that there will be a Prince who will fuck her with a utopian, cinematic snog and bring her back to life. No.
This week the New York Times It opened at full blast: "City without homes or hope." Barcelona, European capital of the housing crisis. And some Barcelona residents begin to dazzle their eyes. Sleepwalkers, drugged, anesthetized for years and locks. Look what's been said, edited, written, rewritten... But you can whistle if the donkey doesn't want to drink-see. Barcelona is a zombie for Barcelona residents and Catalans. A disco for aliens and cannibals. Barcelona, the resigned capital of Catalonia... of Life. It all begins here. When in 1992 the city gains the world, but loses the country. A historic and chronic error. Tabarnia has triumphed. The Spanish and the global: bad taste, poor education, existential illiteracy. They've sold everything to everyone. There's only one thing left.
The Sagrada Família must be finished. Let a vampire fund run by bats buy it. And let them build apartments. Millions. One person per square meter. This is how the housing problem will be solved. And you'll be able to read in the media everywhere: "Barcelona leads the housing solution." And drugs will return to the streets.
