Gaudí on the scaffolding of 2026
The other day Antoni Gaudí resurrected for a little while. He went down the slide from heaven. He did a somersault and rolled down to the Sagrada Família. He set up the portable scaffolding he always carries in his pocket. He took out the sandwich wrapped in brown paper and took a bite of the oily herring. And, well, off to work.
From the top of the world he saw the earth. That teeming mass of motley people. That variegated human salad. That polychromatic bait at the foot of his work. And he thought it was a tribute to his fragile self. Gaudí made a devout post-breakfast bite and out came the relic of a shot-out fishbone. The piece reminded him of the workshop of his disciple: the mosaicist Lluís Bru. Many years ago. That day the architect stared at him. He was trying to place tiles that didn't fit. Mmm, no, no. Gaudí takes a tile, a flowerpot, and inch by inch, he breaks it into a thousand pieces: "We have to put it in handfuls, otherwise we'll never finish." The brittle element is born. The Catalan rupture is born: admired throughout the world, both animal and celestial.
Without the brittle element there would be no modernism. Without the brittle element the planet wouldn't look at Catalonia. Without the brittle element we wouldn't have tourists, plumbers, and pickpockets. It is necessary to break. If we want to build, innovate, advance. Gaudí's work demonstrates many things, physical and spiritual, but among them that Spain is not a sacred and unitary tile. The brittle element is proof that Catalonia is a country, a state of mind (What do you put into yourself? brittle?). This was found stamped on Miguel de Unamuno's lips.
The writer traveled to Barcelona in 1906 to see the construction of the Sagrada Família. They force him. Some want the Unamuno-Gaudí meeting to be a builder of dialogue SL between Spain and Catalonia. Like a good Spanish intellectual, Don Miguel prepared the visit beforehand and publicly lambasted the Catalan language. Moreover, he was late. Gaudí waited for him for half an hour and returned to his cloud. Unamuno disembarked almost at vermouth time and greeted him without taking off his hat. Translated in the search engine of the time: rude as indexing. Gaudí, from the first second to the last, spoke only... Catalan to him. The other hallucinated brittle with lysergic sepia, but since he wasn't brick, he understood. Come on, let me show you the little apartment.
Gaudí reveals everything to him, tells him everything. They go up, they go down, they turn, they get dizzy… There is a moment when Unamuno stops. And from the mouth of the frozen hake comes:I don't like it, I don't like it..."Gaudí, a live sardine, a sardine: "Oh! The Castilians don't like it." And he clicks his fingers:I am not Castilian! I am Basque!"It doesn't matter," he says, damn it, freezing the architect. Silence, we are in the house of the Lord.
They continue the visit and, look, it's already twelve o'clock. An invisible bell rings announcing the Angelus. Gaudí leaves the mouth speechless, and the mouth starts praying like a snail of faith. He finishes and plunges it into the face of the Castilian-Basque: "Laus Deo! Good afternoon to you," a lie. Gaudí did everything he did as a Catalan, neither Buddhist nor a trapeze artist, who from the scaffolding reminds us that "originality consists in returning to the origin."
