When it opened in 2012, promoted by Toni Cruz and Josep M. Mainat and under the auspices of the Gaudí Chair of the UPC, the 4D experience still located on Larrard Street was a complete novelty: three-dimensional glasses, moving seats, air on the feet and water on the face… An investment in money and energy that was worth it and, as proof, still is: tourist queues still form and children, from here and there, leave delighted.
The invention is so successful that it is 2023 and the changes are still small, the main video remains intact and only two initial complements (a few minutes of humor with the virtual dragon roaming the room and a few more minutes explaining Gaudí's architectural universe in a slightly more didactic way) have been introduced recently. In my opinion, it was not necessary. The video alone was and still is didactic, exciting and unforgettable enough. Adding to it cannot improve it. In fact, I believe it is still the best digital experience in the city (even above the interchangeable pharaohs of the Ideal or the aseptic cubic rooms of Casa Batlló).
The recreation of Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century. This alone is worth everything. The descent into the city from outer space to introduce us to a train and among the roads, fields, orchards, laundry hanging in the old neighborhoods, the newly built Columbus statue and carriages around the promenades make one wish it were a definitive film about Barcelona's golden age. The production quality is, from the first moment, visibly high (they use what is called active stereoscopy, which allows for high quality in terms of three dimensions). And the beginning of the story is promising, absorbing, sexy. Once we are in Gaudí's studio, and how nature inspires his drawings, we leave the history of Barcelona and delve into the history of Gaudí: that is, into his imagined city.
I don't know if all the architectural pieces that appear had to give their approval: La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, the Sagrada Família. Even Montserrat experiences an avalanche of stones to shape Casa Milà, just as a group of cypresses seems to inspire the temple's towers. The video perfectly combines reality and delirium, and instead of becoming too abstract or conceptual, it hits the surreal tone of Gaudí's art (and that's why Dalí understood it so well): mysticism, tradition, sensuality, fantasy, exaggeration, and mythology. A video that, far from wanting to bore us about the techniques of hyperbolas in arches or columns, is itself a hyperbolic product. As the genius would have wished.
Knights, dragons, earthquakes, blood, swords, roses, stirred oceans, the heartbeat of the earth, shields with the four bars, moving stones, and restless curves. No history manual is needed to tell history, nor an architecture text to tell architecture, when precisely we have come to use other technologies, when precisely audiovisuals, combined with entertainment and experience, but above all with a good story, do not require a single word. Only when there are many words behind it, only when there is a good story, can it be said that an image is worth a thousand words. And not even then: because the image, by itself, would be nothing.
Lasting more than eleven years is not something most digital experiences can say. And much less ephemeral exhibitions, of course. Perhaps that's why neither La Pedrera nor the Sagrada Família have dared to do any, and perhaps that's why the Palau de la Música is still thinking about it. We have already seen a bit of everything, we have already served tablets and glasses and touch screens of all styles and sizes: now all that remains is for whoever dares again to do so with the desire to create a work of art and not just entertainment. To move, and not to impress. Listen carefully, new stops of technology: you no longer impress us. Try to do something else. Here, at the Gaudí Experience, they have been doing it for eleven years.