Time passes, days are shortening and, as I fall asleep into middle age, it deeply pains me to know that I won't have time to learn everything I would like. Among all these castrated passions is architecture, of which I have not even a shred, and more specifically the obsession that the work of our Josep Lluís Sert, universal Barcelonian, has always awakened in me.
My fellow reader will know to what extent modernist heritage despairs me, with those gaudy facades of fruit salads and saints. . . and also how nauseating I find this Gaudian Easter cake we have embedded in the heart of Barcelona (yes, beloved know-it-all, I already know that my beloved Sert adored Gaudí enough and even dedicated a book to him). But let such kitsch step aside before the hypnotic windows with glass blocks of the Old Roca Jewelry Store or the color scavenger hunt hidden in the physiognomy of the Casa Bloc, a masterpiece of GATPAC in the Sant Andreu neighborhood.
We must applaud when our institutions deal with and study the city's heritage, and that is why -this very week- I trekked to the CCCB to attend a seminar on the architect Sert, very well curated by Lluís Ortega and Moisés Puente (to whom I would only like to amend this very socialist custom of the house consisting of talking about our glories in the language of the enemy). I hope the entity makes the conferences available in video, because so much food for thought was difficult to combine with work hours and also because, despite the pharaonic nature of its means, the CCCB continues to do that very "us" thing of being a very cute and modern place... but with microphones that don't amplify and Lilliputian screens where you can't see a damn thing.
Be that as it may, we must thank Judit Carrera's team for the effort to remember Sert as he deserves, even if hastily, and I would wish that all this helps authorities deign to see him as one of the city's heritage peaks.
It is urgent to give prestige to Sert's work as has been done with other architectural totems of the city.
In this sense, I would say that it is urgent to give prestige to Sert's work, as has been done with other architectural totems of the city. Notice how, to give just one example, one can wander around an accredited masterpiece of rational-Mediterranean hygienism such as the Central Antituberculosis Dispensary (currently and unfortunately, the CAP Dr. Lluís Sayé, and I use the second adverb because this work would deserve to house something of greater entity, such as one of the faculties contiguous to the Ramon Llull University or, why not, an infrastructure dedicated to the architectural heritage of the neighborhood...) without there being the necessary indications or visual perspective to see it as it should be seen.
The building is surrounded by absurd grated fences and I would say that it cries out for both a pictorial restoration of the different facades and a pacification of Carrer de les Torres i Amat which, in turn, could favor the Raval being freed from the tyranny of cars.
At the seminar, one of my favorite works was cited, the Gervasi-born and still Le Corbusier-inspired Casa Genara López.
The imperfect state of many of these buildings can be seen by taking a look at the book Ruta del Racionalisme de Barcelona. El GATPAC i l’arquitectura dels anys 1930 published by the Municipal Institute of Urban Landscape, an anthology volume of about seventy works by the group with texts by Tate Cabré and photographs by Lluís Casals (gentlemen of the City Council, please put the authors of the volumes you publish... on the cover!!! ).
At the seminar, one of my favorite works was cited, the Gervasi-born and still Le Corbusier-inspired Casa Genara López on Carrer Muntaner next to Rector Ubach, designed for his mother and where Sert himself built a terrace with awnings that are a very vivid homage to the Catalan textile industry and the warm half-shade of the Mediterranean. I like to reclaim this rationalist bonbon of light green tones, especially because it marks the holy continuity between the noble city - of the Counts of Sert, that is - and the bourgeois normality of living in a beautiful duplex.
All this is amateur aesthetic nonsense because, as I was telling you, I don't give a damn about flying buttresses and balconies, but I like to feign knowledge to see if I can thus force you to wander around the city without getting engrossed in your mobile phone like idiots. Because days pass, we still don't know enough about architecture, and on top of that, we don't even walk when our ass is pricked. That said, good job to the CCCB and long live our genius Sert.