Gaudí's GatekeeperAuthor(s): Christopher PierceSource: AA Files, No. 62 (2011), pp. 112-113Published by: Architectural Association School of ArchitectureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41378395 .

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Jordi Bonet Armengol Sagrada Família, Barcelona, March 2011

© Toby Glanville

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Gaudi' s Gatekeeper

Christopher Pierce

At first glance the photograph you see here is really quite simple, almost Renaissance-like in its composition, though slightly off centre. The utterly iconic Latin profile (akin to Piero della Francesca's left- facing portrait of Frederico da Montefeltro) is only upset by the northern European corduroy jacket ('poor man's velvet') and by the backdrop, which in this case is not a Tuscan landscape but what appears like a centuiy-old surface. This rough, wall-like shroud is actually a door (notice the vertical slit on the right of the picture, also accounting for its asymmetry) - a door that I know for a fact is signifi- cantly newer than the jacket. There is more evidence of the sitter's identity in the lower right-hand corner. Here the patina of the text on these sm-high bronze doors (a text made up of the Lord's Prayer in a host of different languages) is brought to a shine on the a and g - the initials of the revered Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. The guardian of these initials and the door onto which they are inscribed is Jordi Bonet Armengol, the dapper, octogenarian chief architect of the Sagrada Família.

Following in his father Lluis's footsteps, Bonet Armengol has been working to complete Gaudi's famously incomplete church for nearly 30 years. He has an almost childlike enthusiasm for the build- ing and its architect, but the romanticism of this zeal has had to be balanced by a pragmatism and savvy required to complete his task. At times he has needed to draw on a Medici-like gift for getting what he wants - in fending off the legions opposed to his mission of com- pleting Gaudi's Holy Grail and, more recently, in lobbying officials to demolish a 1960s housing project that was presumably built in a cynical attempt to block the construction of Gaudi's dramatic stair- case up to these doors. In this respect, the stoicism of Bonet Armen- gol's figure resonates. It also affirms the heroic image of the archi- tect outside his own building. Although, in this case, the architect is in the more unusual service of gatekeeper of another's now century- old vision, and the door, which bears his own name just beyond the frame of the shot, also recalls a nobler time when the architect embodied his own building, and when it, and not a corner detail, was the path to his intellect.

I met Jordi on a bright and crisp January afternoon at the aptly named Passion Facade (the three faces of the building are titled Nativity, Passion and Glory). By the time he left two hours later, legging it home to his wife for lunch, we had traversed the rebuilt Provisional School, the recently consecrated basilica interior, the museum, his office and the model workshop, and scaled and cir- cumnavigated the building to its current construction height 70m above ground. For almost all of those scintillating 120 minutes Jordi delivered a messianic digest of Gaudi's intent in razor-sharp English, fuelled by the concession in the previous weekend's El Pais of his long-term antagonist, Oscar Tusquets, who decreed the Sagra- da Família the best building in a century and the most important religious building in 300 years. Following Gaudi's relegation to the fringes of architectural discourse by the titans of twentieth-century

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architectural history (Giedion's only concession is that he was an 'impetuous genius'), the drama unfolding in Barcelona is a kind of latter-day attempt to write him into the canon. I am not so certain, however, that this was the right project to choose. Gaudi's other great unfinished work - the church of Colònia Glieli - is the real jewel in his crown (Pevsner calls it an 'amazing, fascinating, horrible and inimitable church') and the recently completed Calatrava-esque interior on the other side of these Sagrada Família doors, no matter what Tusquets says, is definitely not going to enhance his reputa- tion, but the devoted architect pictured and the spectre of Gaudi in the building's bowels might.

For a few fleeting minutes inside Jordi's model workshop Wunderkammer I felt like I was in an Umberto Eco novel or on a Peter Greenaway film set. The space is sumptuous and, like the basilica above, also a work in-progress. The cruel distinction between interi- or and exterior that now defines the Sagrada Família does not jive with Gaudi. However, under the arches more than 7,000 fragments of his 1:10 and 1:25 plaster models of the project, shamefully destroyed in the Spanish Civil War, are scattered laboratory-like on rows of grey metal shelves (most people, including visitors to the basilica, don't even know they exist). Here, the distinction between new and old, machined and hand-made, has a real currency, as Jordi and his team unravel a tale of Gaudi's legacy in reassembling these pieces. In the process, they are also presciently bringing early mod- ernism's organicism face-to-face with its contemporary 3D-printed progeny in a kind of archaeological parametricism. The reconstruc- tion of these models is a heroic project only flawed, like the building itself, by its dependence on geometry as infill.

But what this picture intimates more than anything else is that a handover is imminent. And with a projected completion date some time in the next 25 years, it is almost certain that the incumbent- in-waiting, the New Zealander Mark Burry, drawing upon a computa- tional expertise, will be the architect who finally finishes the thing. Yet for all of the efforts of their surrogacy, Bonet Armengol and his heir Burry have streamlined Gaudi's story, smoothing out the encrustations of a notoriously unclassifiable architecture and mak- ing it almost commonplace, in which the bling of the baroque is replaced by the bling of the boutique. The result is a kind of Gaudi- lite that spends all of its time perfecting the silhouette of the church's spires while disregarding everything else. Ultimately, then, it is the acres of institutional, airport-like flooring inside that define an experience of the Sagrada Família. This door, too, may also sym- bolise the project, but in another way - as a testimony of Bonet Armen- gol. It is how the photograph superimposes him onto the building that we know his inscription is nothing like the clown-like self-por- trait Ghiberti left on his Florentine Gates of Paradise, but the regal, soon-to-be-minted air of an Erasmus-inspired humanist whose portent is still to call on text when a figure, either plastic or mathe- matic, would never really do.

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