barri digne

every so often around the Ciutat Vella I am distracted by fluttering black and white banners that dangle off balcony railings and window boxes demanding for the right to a dignified neighbourhood with double exclamation marks...

it is a sidewalk-crack-roots protest to bring attention to the deteriorating state of buildings and streets in some quarters that have missed the seductive grasp of gentrification and must now swallow their pride to hang out their really dirty laundry...

barcelona primitivo

doggy love...robot compatible...sign of the times?

even our pets have embraced machines intimately...are we to take heed of the oddness of animal behavior as a premonition of the earth-quaking seduction of artificial intelligence tapping into the power of LOVE??

[the graffiti in Barcelona rock!]

mies barcelona*

it was a pilgrimage to be sure to a structural icon that expanded the repertoire of the modern movement in architecture to the multi-level versions that now tower and dwarf us the world over...
and this singular low-slung and hyper-precise pavilion representing Germany in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition would endow the rigorous and romulian Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with almost god-like status to all the young architects who have marched on ever since...

[the Barcelona chair was a little tattered with an errant thread trailing out of its tufted stitching - I was tempted to tuck it back into the seam!
and if one stares long enough at the marble walls, monstrous and alien creatures will emerge in hallucinagenic flashes!]


[the Pavello Mies van der Rohe was faithfully reconstructed on its original site in the Parc de Montjuic and opened to the public in 1986, the original having been dismantled after the exhibition]

*more images of this pavilion are posted on my ZYGOSPHERE

futbol demigods

on a hilly neighbourhood above Barcelona, we come upon a school football field where the young local soccer stars aspire to divinate their quick-footwork and power-kicks...
the three tiled plaques mounted on an entrance wall to the field commemorate the long veneration of their all-encompassing national sport at the most elemental level...

[this was the closest I got to touching the catalonian futbol gods on the streets of Barcelona...]

tour agbar

from medieval quarters, we ride through wide boulevards to the Plaça de les Glories Catalanes where rises Barcelona's sexiest landmark, on par with the Tour Eiffel in glorifying a city skyline...
this 21st century tower, designed by a french architect no less, soars like a supersonic jetnose into the heavens and sparking chromatic beacons into the nightsky...ever beckoning to the old iron lady not so far away...

[Torre Agbar, by Jean Nouvel with b720 Arquitectos, 2005]

sur le dos

our flight was delayed for hours because the air traffic controllers at CDG were on strike/at rest and KLM couldn't get permission to fly over french air space...
when we finally flew over Paris, a blanket patch of fairy lights, and landed in Barcelona, we felt like we had made the journey by horseback for days over the snowy Pyrenees and crossing devout pilgrims' paths...
we enter the Barri Gotic, darker and more cloaked atmospheric than the Marais, and found this signage welcoming weary horsepowered wanderers...

[Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, Barri Gotic]

back from barcelona*

barcelona could be the new paris for me as I have fallen hard for its sensuous insouciance, its cool unconcern for critical couthness, its autonomous axis of catalonian charisma...
all such curvaceous and naturalistic gaudian phantasmagoria swerves into my spatial consciousness floating through some divine streaming light god-fish chamber...and this was only the hallway to the laundry room!

[Casa Batllo, Antoni Gaudi, 1904-06, Barcelona]

*if I may piggy-back barcelona primitivo onto paris primitif for a little while...