First off, this is not a review of Casa Batlló. You do not need to know whether it is worth your time to visit an Antoni Gaudí building if you happen to be in Barcelona, because if you’re there you’ve probably already made up your mind and you’re not going to have much of a choice. He’s everywhere. For the record, I think he’s alright. I tend to skew modernist anyway, but Catalan Modernisme has a more ornamental character than I’m typically used to. A slightly reactionary one too, for something associated by name with that movement that boldly proclaimed ‘Make it New!’1 There is, of course, the Sagrada Família, an immense gesamtkunstwerk which dominates the area in which we stayed. We walked around it slowly, on a warm night at the end of May, as around us fireflies ebbed from one light source to another. The tourists, who typically form a seething mass around the immense base of the structure, had mostly gone back to their hotels, and in the relatively quiet ambience of the floodlights our minds were finally free to wonder over the ludicrously intricate details - the stained glass sequestered in niches away from the casual observer, the sculptures of Catalan fauna, and the immense spires thrusting up into the black.
Gaudí’s work is certainly eye-catching, which is probably why it’s more celebrated in the mainstream than the concrete edifices of Eastern European Socialist Modernism (which the ‘preservers of Beauty’ over on the New Right have rallied against).
Anyway, what I want to discuss is not Casa Batlló. It’s what happens after you’ve visited Casa Batlló. Once you’ve had your champagne on the retracting balcony and squinted out at the Gothic Quarter from the roof terrace. You are then asked to descend back down another staircase to the basement of the property, where something is waiting for you. Something terrible, festering like a cancer deep in the bowels of Gaudí’s architecture. It’s been there a long time.
I knew something was wrong when we reached the stairs. There was nothing of Gaudí’s familiar style about them, the light and airy quality that he had achieved with the rest of the house dissipated immediately. They looked like this.
The idea, I believe, is that if looked at from a certain angle the light and chains begin to evoke waves, dovetailing with the general theme of aquatica present in the rest of the house. Mostly, however, it actually looked like what would happen if someone gentrified the Cenobite dimension from Hellraiser.
That isn’t the real affront to taste, however. It’s merely a kind of rotten appendage jutting out from the real monster in the basement, dragging down unsuspecting tourists who just wanted to look at some nice stucco and listen to an audio tour. They pass screaming through its immense gullet, and drop wild-eyed and terrified into the atrium of the 360 degree AI Gaudí Cube.
Yes, that’s correct. Before you can peruse the overpriced tat in the gift shop and make a swift exit, you are all but forced to wait in line to spend five minutes in a six-sided LED cube that purports to show you ‘Inside the Mind of Gaudí’. The website for the house proclaims this to be ‘the first 360 degree experience in the world’. I’m willing to accept this may be a slightly humorous translation error (surely life itself is a 360 degree experience for most people), but it certainly speaks to the desperate hyperbole that seems to accompany the copy of most AI art: it will revolutionise x, redefine the boundaries of y.
It’s hardly optional, the only other door in the atrium is a fire exit which means that the only means of egress is through the door on the other side of the cube. That is, unless you have a medical condition. To the side of the enormous entryway, which resembles the door to some sort of futuristic tomb, there is a long list of the various conditions with which under no circumstances should you set foot in the Gaudí Cube. Consider for a moment that the rest of the house, which was renovated by Gaudí between 1904 and 1906, has been made totally accessible even for customers in wheelchairs, whereas a contemporary ‘art’ project that opened in 2021 is outright dangerous for a not-insignificant portion of visitors, and you may begin to wonder about the priorities of the artist behind the Gaudí Cube. You might wish to fake a serious medical condition, if only to skip this part and be back outside doing something worthwhile sooner.
‘What actually happens in the mind of Gaudí then?’ you are undoubtedly wondering. Well, I can show you. It looks like this apparently. Content notice for flashing lights and filming in portrait mode.
That’s right, Antoni Gaudí’s creative process apparently resembled a knock-off Autechre music video (B-TEChre?).
It’s only three minutes long in total, but by about halfway through I found myself missing those stairs with all the chains on them. Come to think of it, maybe there was some interesting interplay between natural light and artificial dark that engaged meaningfully with Gaudí’s design. So if nothing else, the Gaudí cube lowered my standards in other areas. Then it ends, and all that’s left is for the group of people who have been shepherded into the room to mutter amongst themselves mildly: ‘Huh … that was … good … yeah, definitely pretty interesting’. Damned with the faintest of praise.
I’ve been trying to find more information about how exactly the Cube got in there, but there’s very little online about it that isn’t a transparent rewording of a press release. I can tell you that it was designed by Turkish new media artist Rafik Anadol, commissioned by Casa Batlló management in order to ‘expand the magic of Gaudí’. It received a rave review from the World Economic Forum. A ‘dynamic NFT’ of Casa Batlló, designed by Anadol, was sold at Christies for $1.38 million.2
That last detail is the most significant. Behind all the insincere, masturbatory pomp about ‘the genius mind of the architect’, what we have is money changing hands. Once this art fad fades, and the vulture capitalists fly off to concoct another means by which to turn wank into cash, what will be left is a million-dollar hole in the ground: an ugly scar effacing the building around it. How’s that for world heritage status?
I can’t profess to have particularly strong opinions on heritage, but it strikes me that anyone involved should be on guard against snake oil salesmen trying to pitch them ‘revolutionary’ ideas like a cube with screens on it. Let this be a cautionary tale, then. If we are to seriously think about the future of art, we might wish to steer clear of engaging with a method tied so deeply with the climate crisis.3 Gaudí may have desired an aquatic theme for the property, but to risk putting the house, and the rest of Barcelona, underwater is another thing entirely.
I realise that this movement predates the literary modernism spearheaded by Pound by a decade or two, but it’s still interesting that ‘modern’ can be such a porous term.