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Alright, welcome back to Asami's world tour bracket TM part 1, 2, 3, 4. We're in Barcelona.
Yes, so Barcelona was kind of a random choice once again because like I said I have been using this
special airline mileage ticket thing so I don't always get to choose where to go. And after Vienna
the original plan was to go to Norway to visit my friend in Oslo and also in Arendelle. However,
we found out that there's no sort of good ways to go to Norway without breaking more rules so
I literally just asked the phone operator person and be like all right so from Vienna
where can I go? Somewhere in Europe without stopping anywhere else in between and she was
like well you could go to blah blah blah blah Barcelona blah blah and I was like all right
Barcelona it is and I didn't have too too many reasons honestly therefore but once I've decided
that we are going to Barcelona I was quite excited because wanting to go and see Gaudi was
Antoni Gaudi's you know architectural works was sort of one of my kind of life bucket list along
with wanting to see Sagrada Familia before they complete. Yes, so naturally my week in Barcelona
really revolved around seeing lots and lots of lots of architectures and most of it was Gaudi
architectures. So let's see if I can remember this not in chronological order but I went to
Casa Vicens which is one of his first early works that he did and Park Güell I went to
well Casa Calvet from the outside, Casa Batlló, Casa Mila, Park Güell, Colonia Güell which is a
church that Gaudi did. This is a little bit outside of the sort of city center of Barcelona
but I took the train to go there and the reason why I went there is because he used this church
project as a way to sort of prototype many of the things that he did in Sagrada Familia
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and you can see a lot of that happening there. So yeah, I think that's like maybe not quite half
but definitely more than one third of major projects that are accredited to Gaudi that I
got to see and I still have many that I wish I had gone to like Güell Pavilions is one of them
or Palau Güell that's also in Barcelona but I unfortunately didn't have enough time to see this
but all of it was just magnificent in many different ways. It's truly unique unlike any
architectures that I've experienced but maybe just one note about architectures.
You know with improvement in technology and photography techniques there are many
paintings or prints like 2D flat or relatively flat artworks that is pretty well reproduced
online. So perhaps you don't get to see like famous paintings or like you know let's just
say Mona Lisa right? Like maybe you've never seen Mona Lisa in person but you have a pretty darn
good idea of what it looks like and also if you wanted to you can go to the Louvre's website and
pull out an online catalogue, online archive, put in Mona Lisa and see a super high res image where
you can kind of zoom in as much as you want into see every little details of Mona Lisa
without ever going to Paris. And I think this technology is kind of extending even more
to sculptures. So you know that's a 3D artwork that makes it kind of difficult to see
on a 2D screen but people like the National Museum of Western Art has this
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kind of technology pretty convincingly already exists. And I know that there's sort of VR
and maybe immersive you know imaging technology that's coming up but you know you still need
like the headset and stuff like that other things right? So I'm not counting those as sort of like
a replacement experience. And so you can do a 2D sculpture of reasonable size you know you can do
that you can see that you can experience that to a certain extent through 2D screens on your
computer. Architectures on the other hand whether it's Flank Lloyd Wright or Mies van Roo or Gaudi
like this one you really need to kind of go be inside the building or the room that they've designed
to really understand and sort of see the whole point of the design of the architecture. You know
you can all kind of flip through however many professionally taken photos of an architecture
but it still doesn't convey what it looks like what it feels like in that space
and you know how does light from the window interact depending on the time of the day
how does the place smell like how like you know how big is this place how big is this building
you really can only appreciate that once you're in the same environment
and really experience it be sort of surrounded by it. So when it comes to architecture I really
feel like it's worth traveling to places and Gaudi was more than worth it for me. In fact
you know I did bring my own camera to take little photos here and there which I'm happy to share
with all of you. I'll maybe you know put a few images on the show notes but really I quickly
just decided wait there's no way I can take good enough photos to justify how beautiful
and how thoughtful this design is so I just decided to buy one of those like giant catalog
that has most of the works of Gaudi in Barcelona and just like okay that that's my souvenir for
myself I'm just not gonna take photos in these buildings and I'm just gonna experience it
and I think that was the right move. Anyway I think there's too many great things to talk about
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Gaudi and you know I don't think I can say anything more than what's already been said
on the internet. I can say that Soto Etsuro-san, the chief sculptor of the Sagrada Familia,
is a really great sculptor.
Even though they lived in different era,
I can't say anything more than what's already been said on the internet.
you know it's
it just looks weird you know it's it looks like a monster or it looks like a lego block it doesn't
really look like anything you expect a house to look like or a park to look like or a church to
look like or a school to look like and and yet it's not just like random expression of his artistic
desires it has a logic it has clear coherent thought behind it and for Gaudi the through line
the common through line across all of these buildings is that he really put sort of the users
you know the people who will live in the house or the people who come to the church
he really put those people in mind when he was designing it and it wasn't just like this is how
you should build a church and this or this is how i see fit as is you know it this is not to say that
he compromised on his artistic vision like these buildings live and breathe Gaudi's
artistic vision and it's so well reflected in many of them but what was more striking to me
was the little details that he put in so that the user of the building of the space
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can achieve whatever they want to do in this space or building
maybe the small example is his famous handle you know whether it's a door handle or a window handle
it looks like a little piece of twig you know
when you hold it when you put your fingers on it it makes
it makes exact sense it makes it makes total sense to grab a bar in that way because
it's wavy and dented in a way that a human hand will just hold a handle bar and it just
fits snugly and you can exert force naturally to push open or pull open the doors like little
details like that is i've never seen really an architect who cares that much in detail about
the people who would come to this building of course you know they care about the light
they care about the space the ventilation all of these things are there but i think
Gaudi just took it to the next level all the while negotiating that with his artistic vision
which is always rooted in like the nature and sort of the natural elements that he can find
in Catalonia and it was just so fascinating especially after learning that Gaudi led a
pretty recluse life you know he wasn't a loner in a sense like he wasn't like
i mean maybe he was a loner in a certain sense because he never married he was he had like
people he was working with but he didn't have he wasn't the type to like hang out after work or
anything like that he was a very quiet person and one may say he was kind of a lonely person
but when i see this such caring thoughts that went into all of his building whether it is about
the door handle or the way window will catch the light or the way he reused the stones that
was excavated when you know you were plotting the land those details really strike me as someone who
really craved and understood human connections as well in that contrast i wouldn't have sort of
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felt it to my bone if i wasn't there and it was it was so such a special feeling i never really
felt this way about a building or a space so now it's safe to say i'm mildly obsessed with
Antoni Gaudi i think i'm going to read a couple more books that are written about him i really
want to know about his sort of design philosophy more than you know what i've already learned in
the past in the week that i spent in barcelona um yeah but other than Gaudi you should probably
give a couple more minutes on you know barcelona itself barcelona as a city was really fun um i
know that a lot of people warn about pickpockets and stuff like that but i generally felt very safe
buses subways they were all very easy to use and very safe and um just pretty
well laid out city lots of interesting neighborhoods um and good food like i didn't
even have to search for good food all of the food that i just randomly stumbled upon were so good
and yeah it was amazing went to picasso museum i went to see flamenco shows i think i ticked all
of these like you know first time barcelona tourists type stuff if i'm lucky enough to go
there again i think i would want to look at as many other Gaudi artworks as possible
and hopefully uh i have a better understanding of wines or something because i don't drink and
i felt like that's like the one thing i missed out on you know the bar culture
in barcelona i did go to these bars to eat and you know drink water but um i feel like maybe
i should have tried a little harder on the alcohol game but let's see neither here or there so
but yeah uh what a beautiful place uh i think it's actually quite livable
uh for japanese people as well um you know just kind of like the level of cleanliness
um the efficiency of the subway systems yeah kind of resembles tokyo a lot so
yeah that's it oh i also want to go to beach next time maybe
didn't go to either of them so sad anyway uh next up i went to london
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scotland so tune in for that all right bye-bye that's it for the show today thanks for listening
and find us on x at egode science that is e-i-g-o-d-e-s-c-i-e-n-c-e see you next time
