If you are interested in architecture (and probably not, too), surely you have heard about the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the great work of the architect Antoni Gaudi. The temple is a symbol of the Barcelona, at the height of the Eiffel Tower, of Paris, or Big Ben, of the British capital.It is also possible, if you are interested in the subject or have visited Barcelona, to dream the Mila house (or «La Pedrera» ), the Batllo house (or "Casa dels ossos"), the Guell park, among other projects conceived by the great architect who have been declared World Heritage by UNESCO.
But these were not the only creations of the Catalan of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wineries Guell or Villa Quijano de Comillas are less known, Cantabria, among many other works spread across the territory of the Spanish state.Although the ignorance, as is reasonable, of those projects that never got to be executed is greater.One of the most unknown and possibly the most curious is the commission that Gaudi made of a skyscraper for the city of New York , and that had it been built, could have become in an icon of the city, for its Gaudinian singularity .
Hotel Attraction, the tallest skyscraper in the world
In 1908 A group of North American businessmen traveling in Barcelona visited the works of the Sagrada Familia and asked to meet with Gaudi to propose a project: a skyscraper in the Manhattan area, the Hotel Attraction .
Gaudi was then put to work and project a huge building 360 meters high. In order to get an idea, it is relevant to know that precisely that year the Singer building was built in New York , which with only 187 meters became the tallest in the world.context, we see the true magnitude of the project that Gaudi devised for the city. It was, in short, a building ahead of its time .
The Attraction Hotel would have been formed by a central paraboloid body, taller and thicker, and a set of adhered bodies , these which would contain the rooms of the hotel itself.
In the central body, and from bottom to top, We will find five restaurants, each on one floor, and dedicated to the five continents, a party room on the sixth floor, a museum of curiosi American dades and art galleries in the seventh, a concert hall in the eighth and finally, crowning the whole, the most monumental of all (about 120 meters high), the room Tribute to America , with a reproduction of the 10-meter statue of liberty in its center .
The main entrance would have had a huge reception of 17 meters high opening to the facade , is adorned with rich mosaics of colors that would go from green and brown tones at the base of the building, through the gray and red and ending in glazed dome.Topping out the set, a huge lookout star , also of glass, on the cusp of the colossal hotel, conceived almost as a "pagan cathedral" .
In recent years the project has been relaunched as a proposal for the current city of New York.Specifically it was presented as «Substitute» of the World Trade Center after the fall of the twin towers in 2001 and despite the fact that, once again, I did not arrive at the port on that occasion, it would continue to be an idea that would float in the environment for a long time , Either for New York or for another city, and possibly one day it will be built.
The doubts: Authentic Gaudi?
For more attractive and interesting this seems to us project, given the circumstances, we are obliged to grant the "hex" of the doubt. Although the acceptance of the project as authentically Gaudinian is quite widespread, the conditions under which we are aware of it are, at least, mysterious .
The fact is that we know the project from a single source: The sculptor Joan Matamala, son of the sculptor Llorenc Matamala, published his exi stence in 1956 , in the book When the New Continent called Gaudi (1908-1911). The author of the book was a 15-year-old at the time of the arrival of the businessmen Americans and worked as an apprentice in the Sagrada Familia workshop, together with his father .Secondly, he witnessed the arrival of businessmen and learned of the project that had been commissioned to the architect: "When Gaudi returned to the studio after this farewell, he was remarkably worried (...) It made me assume that the two Americans had expressed something particular to him" .Matamala added in the footnote: " I respect that due to my youthful condition, due to the architect's affairs, I was not allowed to intervene in certain aspects that today would constitute valuable data.” However, it is only his testimony, indeed detailed, that gives memory to the project in his whole. With the book a set of sketches and plans attributed to Gaudi himself and many others made by Matamala himself were published, based on what he said he remembered from the original project .Some of the documents, autographed by Gaudi, were studied by Mexican architect Marcos Mejia Lopez in his doctoral thesis Research on a Gaudi skyscraper in New York (1992), and he gave them as genuine .clear the doubts.However, the project continues to be surrounded by a certain aura of mystery.
The mysterious thing is that nobody else, not even the closest collaborators to the architect, ever made public mention of this skyscraper .On the other hand, American businessmen have no name and ot The Atlantic side apparently did not know anything about the building before the appearance of Matamala's memories. Intriguing is , also, the shortage of documents made by Gaudi himself to a project of this magnitude.
The sculptor tries to get out of these doubts and based on footnotes leaves us the idea of a Gaudi who took the project as a responsibility exclusively his and in the which worked without flaunting it, so very few people would have been aware.In relation to the limited original documents, Matamala refers to the looting that took place in the Sagrada Familia workshop in 1936 and argues that most manuscripts would have been lost on that occasion.However, all this secrecy smo and intrigue never cease to raise doubts about it .
The theory of the most skeptical
Could Matamala have invented everything with some motivation outside the architecture? This is what some people believe, who think that after they believe a false Gaudi, there could be a political motivation .
If we place ourselves in the At the time of Matamala's publication, we are already under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco .«The government of the Generalisimo» has passed in 1956 its most difficult time, that of international isolation and precisely the United States It is the one who opens the gap through which the dictatorship begins to see the light worldwide .In 1953, important agreements were signed between Franco and President Eisenhower and two years later Spain joined the UN.
In this context, suddenly, the Matamala memory appears.The skeptics of the Hotel Attraction project The sculptor's publication is listed as a strategy linked to the regime and the US government, to "swell" common ties.
However, this theory also has its buts .The selection of the figure of Catalan Gaudi might not have been the most appropriate for the design of a strategic fiction like this , given the proscription of the catalan by the regime.It is particularly noticeable, for example, that the scale of Gaudi's project was 1: 1714, referring to September 11, 1714, date in which the troops of Felipe V of Spain culminate the assault on Barcelona, and which is commemorated by Catalanism as a patriotic date.It does not seem to make much sense that the Franco regime infiltrates this Catalan symbolism in its political artimana.
Beyond the mysterious half century of silence, there seems to be no solid theory to provide a cell phone to Matamala to invent such a great forgery.Probably, the truth is that the proposal to Gaudi did exist, but perhaps only as a remote possibility to be carried out a posteriori, and Gaudi confined himself to conceiving a project In general, this would explain the ignorance of its collaborators in this regard and the shortage of plans and sketches.The magnitude of the events could be swelled by Matamala, which perhaps was spreading, consciously or unconsciously, the story over the years..
If you liked this article, you may want to discover the monasteries "suspended in the air" of Meteora.
Images: Joan Garcia Silano, Pepe Manteca, diegoperez74, Jaume Meneses, Ken Douglas.
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