Planeta Batlló

At five minutes to seven, the top floor of Casa Ametller turned off the lights and closed the curtains. As if to say that, if the beautiful girl was to shine at her party, it would not be the stubborn old Puig i Cadafalch who would try to divert attention. Come on, let everything go dark and let the light show begin. But first, a QR code was projected on the upper part of the facade, which is supposed to be a gift, but most attendees cannot open it because it turns out that between Casa Batlló and the public there are, oh surprise, tree branches. Therefore, we are left without knowing anything about the gift, but the mapping starts punctually at seven and, like blue fire torches in a futuristic liturgy, mobile phones are raised. Our new eyes, our brain, our new extension of the soul. Reality captured, very soon on our screens.

The mapping created by Sofia Crespo on the skin of Gaudí's apple of the eye is a sample of the immense evolution of this discipline, either due to technological advances or the talent of the Argentine artist, if we recall the first awe-inspiring displays in front of the City Hall for La Mercè at the beginning of the millennium. Now the mapping is fluid, agile, like plasticine, it has no time for demonstrations of power and, instead, dances to the rhythm of neurons, that is, quickly, like in the most thrilling dreams. Unlike what happened this Christmas at the Hospital de Sant Pau, which however beautiful it was, was much more predictable (and much more rigid), Crespo's mapping is poetic and dreamlike and understands very well what this piece of edible architecture is about.

Fortunately, the builders of the Eixample only listened to Cerdà up to a point and not only named the streets as God intended, but also put houses in the shape of dragons, sinuous airplane parking lots, Sleeping Beauty castles, dark knight palaces, and residences with crocanti roofs. Modernism showed Cerdà that imagination is not egalitarian, because the brain is not grid-shaped and the soul, even less so. Which is also a warning for the digital world: smaller (and justified) doses of Crespo and less proliferation of immersive rooms. Reality, nature, art, humanism, but also our patience, deserve respect.

Crespo has presented us with a Big Bang and an alternative Darwinian theory full of beauty and surrealism, where not much image can be retained for long

The texture stretches prodigiously under Crespo's designs, and the windows and balconies become almost sunken paper pulp that could have been otherwise, had another shape, but by designs of beauty have turned out to have the shape that the Great Architect gave it. Microscope but also telescope, a kind of big kiss full of fantasy, because we go to sleep still wondering what happened. It wasn't exactly Gaudí today, nor was it exactly Modernism, but rather the origin of everything, which is what makes up originality.

Crespo has presented us with a Big Bang and an alternative Darwinian theory full of beauty and surrealism, where not much image can be retained for long and where the forms that have impacted the retinas do not quite want to stop being amorphous. All this accompanied by the music of Robert M. Thomas, half unsettling, half lullaby, and also based on the technique of algorithms: technology can be very scary, but it doesn't have to have an excessively cold sound either. After all, the point is for it to match the image and synchronize: and that, Crespo's waves and M. Thomas's ripples, achieve.

The mapping innovates, just as Gaudí left Modernism in its underwear, and now they use artificial neural networks (AI) as a tool: algorithms that extract visual patterns from data, so we don't see exactly shells, or exactly ribs, but at all times we seemed to see something very familiar. Non-existent creatures, but based on existence, what they call data interpretation today. The result is as Martian as it is earthly, as impossible as it is made of stone and brick. As a scientific and environmental element contributed to the project, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center has participated in the aquatic sequence by providing high-resolution ocean circulation models. And as production and direction credits, the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) fair, which has been held in Barcelona since this Tuesday, and the Entangled Others team, whom we recently saw exhibiting their interpretation of the architectural essence of Domènech i Montaner at the Palau de la Música.

What we were saying: until Puig i Cadafalch's turn comes, it's better for him to close the curtain and go to sleep. These anarcho-romantic occurrences no longer respect order, nor the grid, nor sanity, nor academia, nor anything.