Gaudí!

   Antoni Gaudí is a famous architect and he has built some of the most famous buildings and many of them are here in Barcelona. He was born in 1852 and died in 1926. He had a different mind than any other architect. His imagination was fantastic! He included animals and nature in his buildings to make them unique.   

 

     Perhaps his most famous building is the church called La Sagrada Familia. La Sagrada Familia is extremely big and it has 8 towers, 4 on the back, and 4 on the front. It was started in 1882, but it was left unfinished for some years because of the death of Gaudí. Now they are still working on it, thanks to Gaudí leaving an original copy of the building plan that explained how he wanted it to look. We walked up a spiral staircase, and when we got to the top, we could see the whole city!

     One last building that Gaudí built before starting to work on La Sagrada Familia is Casa Milá a.k.a. La Pedrera. Like I said before Gaudí had a very imaginative mind. He made this building wavy, with no 90 degree angles! It’s also an apartment building and the people who live there are lucky! They have a museum exactly above them! We went up to the roof and the chimneys have broken bottle pieces embedded in them! You could also see La Sagrada Familia from the roof. 

     Gaudí also designed the park called Parc Güell. He used a lot of tile work like broken plates, broken bowls, imprints of twigs, and much more. He designed a bench that doesn’t look wavy if you look at it straight on, but if you look at it sideways, it is extremely wavy! He put a statue of a beautifully tiled and brightly colored lizard in the front of the park, which seemed to be quite famous because so many people wanted their picture taken next to it! Somehow my mom and me squeezed in to get our picture taken before we got mauled by the hoard of tourists!

          Speaking of getting mauled, Gaudí died on June 10, 1926 when he got cruelly crushed by a passing tram. When he was in the hospital nobody recognized him because of his shabby clothes! He didn’t demand special treatment because he was a humble tío (in Barcelona slang, “tío” means dude and uncle but in this instance it means dude). He is now buried in the crypt in La Sagrada Familia.