Barcelona – Saturday

Today our planned activity was to visit La Pedrera, an apartment building designed by Antoni Gaudi and constructed between 1906-1912.  After breakfast at the hotel, we again set off down Avenida Diagonal walking to La Pedrera, about a half hour walk.

20160326_041150 (1024x664)La Pedrera, quarry in Catalan, is a several story apartment building.  It got its name from the rough stone appearance.  It is, quite frankly, a weird looking building, all wavy and having unusual things sticking up from the roof.  The tour starts in one of the ground floor patios, which is open all the way up through the building to the sky.  It must have been really something originally, but now the beautiful colors of the paintings are quite faded.

From the patio, you take a lift up to the roof and there you see very unusual things, but all brilliantly conceived by Gaudi.   Gaudi transformed a space that was not usually given much thought when a building was designed, into a universe of shapes and textures.  Chimneys, ventilation towers and stairwells go beyond their role and are converted into sculptures of disturbing form.

Gaudi probably would win an Oscar for set design in the 21st century!

After the rooftop terrace, we went to the building’s attic, which I found to be the most fascinating.  Gaudi used catenary arches, 270 of them, to support the roof.  In the attic, originally the building’s laundry, is an exhibit of Gaudi’s life and work and presents his creations through scale models and plans, objects and drawings, photographs and videos.

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Hanging from ceiling

A couple of exhibits were most fascinating.  One showed how he visualized for structural form of his buildings.  He would draw the floor plan and tack it to the ceiling.  From the plan he would hang chains and from each end of the chain it would droop into an arch, a catenary arch.  He did this designing Sagrada as well as for La Pedrera.  One of the exhibits was a model of the structure chains hanging from the ceiling over a mirror so one could see what the structure would look like when constructed.  It was fascinating.

Here are several views of the catenary arches, beautiful brick structures.

The tour included a “demo” apartment as it might have been in the early 20th century.  Gaudi designed all of the fixtures, hardware and details.  I liked the mouldings the best, lovely wavy patterns all around the doors and windows.  I won’t bore you with pictures of that.

After our visit to La Pedrera, we had a coffee break across the street.  Then we boarded the Hop On Hop Off bus, having purchased a 2-day ticket.  There are two different circuits around Barcelona and over 2 days, we rode both circuits which allowed us to take in a lot of Barcelona from the top of a double-decker bus.

We got off the bus for a late lunch at a place called the Rad Café and then hopped back on the bus to Placa de Catalunya, one of the main plazas in the city.  It being Easter Saturday, the plaza was jam packed with tourists and families.  Christine had fun watching little kids chasing pigeons.  We then joined 20,000 other people in a ramble down Las Ramblas, probably “the” tourist area from the plaza down to the seafront.  I guess we did it to just say that we did it.

At the seafront, we decided to take a sunset boat ride and boarded Las Gondolerias.  We went out into the sea and travelled parallel to the beach for about 45 minutes, and then back to the shipping and cruise ship port and then back into Port Vell.  It was fun seeing the sights from the water.

After our boat ride, we hopped on the bus again to return to our hotel.  We had to ride the circuit again, but this afforded us nighttime views of Barcelona from Montjuic, one of the highest points in the area.  We also got a glimpse of the Magic Fountain, one of Barcelona’s best tourist attractions.  I’m sure the entire fountain show is spectacular, judging from the little we saw.

We eventually got to the stop a block away from our hotel and returned to our room happy and tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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