Barcelona
Barcelona is a city where architecture and urbanism are one. Everyone knows the Antoni Gaudí, the brilliant Catalan whose passion, at once religious and aesthetic, yielded buildings of extraordinary sensuousness, a kind of melted, lyrical art nouveau with hints of Gothic. Gaudí set the tone for the city, for the way its physical forms, too strong to be backdrops, influence your emotions. First thing to visit was the Sagrada Família church, surely the most extraordinary personal interpretation of since the Middle Ages. Gaudí started it in 1884, designing as he went until killed when struck by a tram in 1926; the place should have been left as a dazzling ruin, but instead work continues a pseudo-Gaudí architecture rising in mistaken homage to the master. Most of what is there is still Gaudí’s own, but that may not be true in another generation.
The original post here: www.travel.nationalgeographic.com
