Barcelona 人滿為氾:Heaven on Earth/ Catalonia 獨立公投/Catalonia's Human Towers Rise Even as Spain's Economy Sinks

Barcelona is one of the great cities on Earth is something on which most people can agree. The architecture, the fiestas, the food—it is a city with vibrancy and soul. But it is on the horns of a tourism dilemma. The city’s mayor-elect is looking at ways to stop the influx of visitors because, she thinks, it is in danger of becoming overrun and turning into little more than a theme park http://econ.st/1G9CdlY

Financial Times

Property in Catalonia: Barcelona attracts foreign buyers despite concerns over the region’s independence campaignhttp://on.ft.com/1zuFQOU

Rising tension between Madrid and Catalonia reached a new peak on December 12th with the announcement by the Catalan president, Artur Mas, that he plans to hold an independence referendum on November 9th next year http://econ.st/1jXF9at

Barcelona :Heaven on Earth/ Catalonia 獨立公投
Catalonia Sets Nov. 9 as Date for Independence Referendum
Direct Challenge to Spain's Central Government


By
Matt Moffett And
David Román

Updated Dec. 12, 2013 4:02 p.m. ET


MADRID—Political leaders in Spain's wealthy Catalonia region have set a date for a referendum on declaring independence, but the Spanish prime minister flatly stated such a vote was unconstitutional and wouldn't be permitted.

The preparation for a secession vote in Catalonia, which has long chafed under what it calls economic and cultural dominance from Madrid, sets Spain's leading industrial region on a collision course with the...

 Yo-Yo Ma 很久沒到台灣了.
上次在自由廣場聽他諒解台灣的處境. 用西班牙的Catalonia之獨立鼓舞我們.
這幾年"馬友友"的說法對他是大侮辱
 Yo-Yo Ma是大師希望他能寫回憶錄.
YouTube應該有他上百的片. 今天用 此兩大師之小品:Yo-Yo Ma & Bobby McFerrin
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GczSTQ2nv94

 

Catalonia's Human Towers Rise Even as Spain's Economy Sinks

Tradition Thrives as Haven of Inclusiveness in New Era of Upheaval

Updated Dec. 11, 2013 11:52 p.m. ET

The Spanish tradition of building castells, or human towers, is seeing a revival. Watch the flesh and blood towers rise, and sometimes fall. WSJ's Matt Moffett reports from Spain's Catalonia region.

VILA-RODONA, Spain—Jesús Zazo stood in the ancient plaza in a throng of other pink-clad members of the Colla Vella dels Xiquets club. He had everything riding on this grudge match in the Catalonia region's signature competitive event: human-tower building.

Mr. Zazo scrummed together with a couple of hundred other club members who formed the circular base of the tower, or castell. Three broad-backed men clambered atop this flesh-and-blood platform, wrapping arms in a huddle. Tier by tier, the tower grew. At seven levels, Mr. Zazo's tiny daughter, Sarai, her face almost hidden by her helmet, began shimmying up. Halfway to the top, the 9-year-old seemed about to lose her footing. But she recovered, using the waist sashes worn by other club members like rungs on a ladder, and darted to the summit.

Castells Are Rising in Catalonia

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Colla Vella built human towers last month in front of Manresa's city hall, drawing crowds. Edu Bayer for The Wall Street Journal

Things went less well for rival club, Colla Joves Xiquets. When its youthful tower topper reached the peak, she gazed down and panicked. The structure began to buckle and then collapsed in a sprawling heap.

The vertigo-inducing tradition of building human towers, which has survived civil war, depression and dictatorship over two tumultuous centuries, is thriving as a haven of inclusiveness in a new era of upheaval in Catalonia.

"Castells are rising all over Catalonia and the clubs are full of all kinds of people who want to prove they have what it takes to form part of a tower," said Salvador Domingo, a fourth-generation Colla Vella member who was baptized in the club's shirt. Colla Vella incorporates characters as diverse as a laid-off ambulance technician, a Colombian ballerina and an 85-year-old great-grandfather, as well as plucky little Sarai and her dad.

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Colla Vella dels Xiquets club members

This year Catalan clubs have made just over 10,000 castells, compared to 5,700 five years ago, according to the governing Coordinator of Catalan Castell Clubs. There are some 60 Catalan tower-building clubs, more than ever before, and a score of new ones are being chartered. Twice this year, a colla—or club—mounted and dismounted a 10-tier castell, a feat achieved only twice in the previous 200 years.

Greater safety-consciousness is contributing to the castell building boom. Helmets are now required for youths at the top tiers, and tower clubs practice several times a week to cut down on accidents. (There have been five recorded castell-making deaths over the past 200 years, according to the coordinator of the clubs.)

There are many variations of castells that differ on how many levels they have and how many people they have per level. The groups perform at local fairs and at holiday events in towns throughout the region.

Tower building had been growing steadily since the 1980s, but it has reached new heights since the collapse of Spain's economy in 2008. Tower clubs have become refuges for unemployed young people like Aleix Magriña, 26, who recently lost his job with an ambulance service. Colla Vella provides him something to do with his free time and contacts with odd jobs.

The economic crisis has also fired up a vigorous independence movement in Catalonia, and castells are more cherished than ever as symbols of this northern region's cultural distinctiveness from the rest of Spain.

Colla Vella is one of the oldest clubs, with its own housing development and section of the cemetery set aside for members. The Colla Vella versus Colla Joves rivalry is to Castell-building what the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox rivalry is to baseball—except for one thing: The tower antagonists come from the same town, Valls, and are thus reminded of their mutual dislike on a daily basis at the bakery or carwash.

The week before the event in Vila-Rodona, Colla Vella members had come out for another competition with Colla Joves only to find a crude insult about them spray-painted on the pavement. Then, when a 7-year-old boy was climbing to the top of what would have been a record-tying 10-story castell for Colla Vella, Colla Joves engaged in some further gamesmanship, witnesses say. "It's not stable!" Colla Joves members cried, according to people who were there. "Get off now!" The boy became rattled and climbed down from the seventh tier, frustrating Colla Vella's bid to make history.

Josep Fernández, Joves's president, apologized for the message on the pavement, and said that he didn't hear any of the trash talk, but that he wouldn't have approved of it.

Castells emerged in Catalonia during the late 18th century as a display of brawn, nerve and teamwork for rural males. The human towers waned in the 1930s amid a depression, a bloody civil war and the start of the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Some of El Generalísimo's minions ordered children to make the fascist salute when they topped a castell.

Castells began their comeback after Spain returned to democracy in the late 1970s, gradually drawing more people from the urban middle class, immigrants and eventually women. "You need a lot of bodies and a lot of different types of bodies to make castells, so everyone is welcome," says Alfonso González, a leader of the Nens del Vendrell colla.

It happens that the child who tops the castell for Vendrell is the daughter of a Moroccan immigrant. That made for an incongruous scene not long ago when, after one especially riveting performance, the immigrant girl was warmly embraced by a politician from a far-right party with a virulently xenophobic platform. "I'm not sure if he didn't realize she was an immigrant, or if he was just carried away by the excitement," said Mr. González.

Girls are generally preferred to boys at the top levels, because they are not only lighter and more agile, but also considered more fearless. Clareth Veronica Vasquez, a 17-year-old Colombian immigrant, was recruited by Colla Vella from a ballet studio because of her physical grace and coolheadedness. Sarai Zazo's older brother isn't interested in scaling castells, her father says, but she has topped scores of them since starting at four years old.

In a Colla Vella event in November, the boy who had climbed down from the failed 10-story castell redeemed himself when he scrambled up another tower without a hitch.

The castell-climbing comeback didn't surprise 85-year-old Magi Güell, who has worked his way down from top to the base over decades at Colla Vella. "In Catalonia, there's always another castell to be built, and always a place for everyone there," he said.

Heaven on Earth

Antoni Gaudí was a fervent Catholic whose fantastical buildings burst with colour, freedom and hedonism - is he the greatest urban architect of modern times? Jonathan Jones sings his praises

Saturday October 20, 2007
The Guardian


Gaudi's La Pedrera at dusk. Photograph: Santiago Lyon/AP

Traffic had stopped, shops were shut and paving stones were being uprooted to build barricades. Up on a roof a British volunteer soldier, gun to hand, waited for what looked like an inevitable battle in the street below between the communists and his own leftist group, the Poum militia. At least George Orwell had a great view of Barcelona. He could see "vista after vista of tall, slender buildings, glass domes and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea."

Orwell was not in Barcelona as a tourist, and this is the one lyrical description of the city in Homage To Catalonia, his memoir of fighting in the Spanish civil war. He had more urgent things on his mind than identifying the architect of those "fantastic curly roofs". And in fact even today, when the fame of Antoni Gaudí is probably unmatched by any other architect, you can still encounter in the streets of Barcelona a Gaudí building you hadn't known about. It happened to me recently. I came out of the Passeig de Gràcia station on to a dusty, traffic-roaring city street and there, among the dense facades, was a house that bulged and warped, reaching up to a turquoise, green and violet elfish cap, like a fairyland roof in a children's book. The entire front was dappled with shards of technicolour tiles, bent into balconies, supported by massive stone limbs. At the summit was a tower topped by a bulbous cross.
Was it a Gaudí? For a moment I wasn't sure, but one thing I knew - I was uplifted by this building as by almost no other I have seen.
In his book about the architecture of another great seaside city, The Stones Of Venice, the Victorian critic John Ruskin makes some claims about architecture that can seem pretty romantic - until you encounter Casa Batlló. Human beings, Ruskin insists, by nature want to do good, not bad - and that is why we respond to the sight of true goodness when it is fixed in stone. Can architecture be morally as well as aesthetically beautiful? I can only say that on my first view of Casa Batlló, I felt the same sense of goodness and virtue that moved Ruskin in the religious architecture of the middle ages. And I realised it had to be a Gaudí.
I'm sure it was Casa Batlló that caught Orwell's eye as he stood at his sentry post in May 1937. He was stationed near Plaça de Catalunya, where anarchists had seized the telephone exchange, and the Passeig de Gràcia, on which stands Gaudí's unreal house, runs from there. What I noticed first was how magically it enriches the Barcelona of now. Cars rush past, pedestrians rush past, it's a fast city, not some toytown, yet here is this building that seems worthy of heaven itself, right on the street.
When you look closer, it is not such an ordinary street. Gaudí's masterpiece is flanked by other extravagant fin-de-siècle creations. One is a quixotic blend of Moorish fantasy and Venetian gothic, another has a stepped roof covered in tiles, like a Dutch merchant's house intoxicated by fiesta. These are the houses of rich businessmen determined to flaunt their wealth. They were built in explicit rivalry and in the glare of publicity in the early 1900s - the row of rivals was dubbed "the apple of discord" and the houses, too, had nicknames: Gaudí's was La Casa dels Ossos (House of Bones) because its columns look a bit like femurs. Critics and cartoonists mocked the intense ambition of the architects Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch - and Antoni Gaudí.
A stylistic explosion was convulsing Barcelona 100 years ago. Gaudí is the genius of modernisme - not "modernism" as we now understand the word but a very different aesthetic, a distinctive Catalan version of art nouveau's florid response to the challenge of turn-of-the-century life.
As is shown by Barcelona 1900, a major exhibition of this modernisme before modernism now on at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, it didn't spring from nowhere. Hundreds of years earlier, Barcelona had been the great sea port of the medieval land of Aragon, with its own language and a Catalan cultural identity that spilled over into France. Castile and Aragon were unified in the Renaissance, with the new state dominated by Castile. By the 19th century, Spain was a sad, ruinous place where Catholicism was violently enforced in an impoverished society left behind by the Industrial Revolution. Barcelona was different - it was dynamic, locked into European markets, and saw itself as a cultural leader of a Catalonia that had more in common with Paris than Madrid. Artists such as the young Picasso - who first made his name as part of a group of modernista dandies who hung out at the "artistic" cafe Els Quatre Gats - moved easily between Gaudí's Barcelona and the Montmartre of Toulouse-Lautrec. The "modern" style was deeply romantic, a smoky dream of city life. Perhaps the closest thing to Gaudí's flowing architecture outside Barcelona are the sinuous art nouveau bronze tendrils of Paris metro station entrances - one of which can be seen now in the Salvador Dalí museum in his birthplace, Figueras, near Barcelona. Dalí, proudly Catalan, claimed Gaudí as his true inspiration, and adored the "terrifying and edible" modernista style.
So Barcelona modern was about finding a poetry for the new, turbulent world of the 20th-century city - and none was more turbulent than this. On the one hand, it was home to the nouveaux riches in palaces comparable to those of the Medici and Strozzi in Renaissance Italy, yet it was also a place of extreme working-class poverty. In 1909 the city was torn apart by riots - a foretaste of the civil war that would come in 1936 when Franco's army rebelled against a democratic republic in the name of Catholic Spain. This was what brought to Barcelona, centre of the people's resistance, volunteers such as Orwell.
Looking at the buildings on Passeig de Gràcia, it is all too easy to see how the modernista style fits into this city's story. In the end the great palaces of Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch are no more moving than any overt display of money. Yet that is not what Gaudí's Casa Batlló feels like at all. It, too, was commissioned by a rich bourgeoisie, but it projects this extraordinary communal ethos.
Some sense of inner coherence tells you even from the street that there are wonders within the Casa Batlló. In the hall, every wall and fitting curves, in spiralling, sea-like movements: you feel as if you are inside a deep cave. Books are filled with his technicolour ornament, yet the invisible is what matters most in Gaudí's architecture - the oceanic and subterranean sense of space it generates. He embraces you in an inner world whose contours are defined by construction so softly yielding that, walking up the broadly circling staircase, you feel as if you're being carried into the house on a gentle updraught. In an upstairs alcove, a tiled fireplace with fitted seats is sunk into a wall, a homely architectural fitting, emanating kindness and love.
Gaudí, you might conclude, must have been a settled family man. In fact, he never married (though he had a couple of unrequited passions) and his life was one of fervent Catholic asceticism. He was born in 1852, the son of a coppersmith. His parents made big sacrifices so he could study architecture at the University of Barcelona. In a city obsessed with building, it wasn't hard to get work as an architect and he soon secured a network of rich, religious patrons, above all the industrialist Don Eusebi Güell. Catholic piety bound his little social world: once during Lent, Gaudí fasted so extremely it endangered his health.
In other words, Gaudí is one of those whose biography tells you almost nothing about his work. That he was intense and disciplined is obvious from his achievement, and on top of the Casa Batlló a white flower-like cross proclaims the architect's faith. But where do the dreamlike freedom and grave hedonism of this house come from? To enter its great front room is to be amazed that anyone actually lived in this heavenly salon. The ceiling is liquid, the swirling vortex sculpted into it making it seem to be revolving and billowing. The windows look out not simply on the city but on the city transfigured by massive stonework. The solid dissolves and space is given form.
There's not a sightline that does not afford some new surprise, some subtle or bold pleasure. You pass through rooms that curve and wobble, up the blue-tiled stairwell of tenants' flats, to a white, ethereal attic and finally on to that fairyland roof.
Architecture is the art we all encounter most often, most intimately, yet precisely because it is functional and necessary to life, it's hard to be clear about where the "art" in a building begins. Architectural genius is not about conforming to a certain set of rules. The architect's greatest achievement is to make a building contain a thought. For me, there is something incomparably mysterious about entering a building that is the self-expression of a passionate mind.
I've lingered in the Casa Batlló because for me it is Gaudí's masterpiece, where he perfectly achieves this sense of expression and poetry, yet it is a functioning house and apartment block. A poet doesn't have to include light fittings or doors. A painter doesn't have to put in a toilet. But an architect has to. The house has to work. To achieve that and to transform everything about the place into a unified work of art... how do you do it?
You have to have an exceptionally strong vision, an almost mystical sense of purpose. This is why so many of the greatest architects - Michelangelo, Bernini and Borromini, Gaudí - have been deeply religious. You could say architecture is the best reply to militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins because almost all the world's finest buildings are religious. But Gaudí was not working in a straightforward Christian tradition. Far from it.
Casa Batlló is a place to live in, yet it tantalises the mind with the idea of paradise. Has anyone ever built anything as dreamlike? The answer is yes. The first time I visited Barcelona, I'd just got off a train from Andalucía and my head was full of Moorish mosques and palaces. I remember wandering in the Alhambra in the evening light, under its stalactite-like stucco ceilings, with the view of Granada and the blue sky seeming to float in the windows, and actually raving loudly, "I'm in heaven!" I haven't been back in years, but I had exactly that sensation in Casa Batlló - and not accidentally. Spain's heritage of Islamic architecture, unique in Europe, includes some of Islam's highest artistic achievements.
Gaudí's architecture is inspired by Al-Andalus not just in its flashes of orientalism - his first major house, Casa Vicens in Barcelona, is a Moorish pastiche - and his use of coloured tiles, but above all in his shaping of space. You do not look at the Alhambra as you would, say, at the dome of St Peter's - you move through it, inhabit it. Gaudí's walls and ceilings are as oscillating and unreal as the walls of Islam and create the same rich sense of a reality on the verge of vanishing into pure spirit. Yet he's undeniably a Christian architect.
The crowds spill out of the metro and press against the railings to look up at the cascading waterfalls and stalactites, the angels, boats, caves and trumpets that spill down from above, all sculpted in stone, much of it nearly a century ago, some of it more recently. Some English blokes sit on the steps talking about a boozy night. You don't have to care about the place to come here - the Sagrada Família is the necessary destination for every visitor to Barcelona.
Inside people are queueing to go up the tapering towers and the shop is full of model Sagrada Famílias, plastic forests of cones. But stand in the cavernous interior, where men are patiently piecing together massive white stone vaulting to Gaudí's design, and it is as if you were in one of the great and enigmatic cathedrals of 13th- and 14th-century Europe when they were still being built. In the Sagrada Família, he created not a building, but an experience of building. He started a process that has gone on ever since and will go on much longer yet - and it is a sort of ethical and imaginative education. I've never been at a building site like this before, where the laying of every stone, the carving of every detail by modern artisans following Gaudí's plans, is a sacred, reverent act.
Gaudí took on the commission in 1883, when he was just starting his career. In his lifetime he saw much of the facade finished and began the towers. It's a slow build, but not yet as slow as the gothic cathedrals of Cologne and Milan, each of which took centuries. When Gaudí started work on his sacred building, it was not necessarily the act of a mystic: religious architecture was very much in the mainstream of 19th-century culture. The wonder of the Sagrada Família is that it does more than echo gothic style; it goes to the heart of medieval building, shared by the Moors in Andalucía and the master masons of Salisbury or Notre Dame: that mystical belief in the nobility and grace of reverently assembled stone, that desire to build a temple worthy of the divine, to give the earthbound a glimpse of heaven's majesty.
The Sagrada Família instantly won over the city - but not Orwell. After the May days in 1937 when the Poum was outlawed, he had to go underground. By night he slept in gutted churches - destroyed by workers who believed Catholicism colluded in oppressing the poor - and by day he pretended to be a tourist. "For the first time since I had been in Barcelona, I went to have a look at the cathedral... one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It had four crenellated spires the same shape as hock bottles. Unlike most churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution - it was spared because of its 'artistic value' people said."
Gaudí died in 1926, 10 years before the civil war began. He was hit by a tram and looked so poor and dishevelled, people thought he was a homeless indigent. But his building was already more than a work of art in the city's imagination: it was seen, rightly, as being somehow on the side of the people, rather than flaunting the church's power and wealth. An 1898 painting by Joaquim Mir shows starving, ragged people sitting around the building site of the unfinished Sagrada Família; the painting is called The Cathedral Of The Poor. It seems Orwell was being politically as well as aesthetically tone deaf. Mir's scene of urban poverty resembles the depiction of the marginalised in Picasso's Blue Period paintings - his homages to the poor of Barcelona. Like him, Gaudí captured the tragedy as well as the pride of this city.
He is the greatest urban architect of modern times, not just giving Barcelona its look but actively reforming the life of the city. He didn't only design places to live and pray, but sought to influence the life of an entire community - and succeeded. The only place that offers more fantastic modernist thrills is New York - but you can't call the greatest American architects "urban" designers. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum is a beautiful artefact that does nothing for the city around it. Even the most amazing skyscrapers stand alone. Here's an amazing fact: in 1908 Gaudí was asked to design a hotel in New York. His drawings imagine a conical skyscraper reminiscent of the Sagrada Família's towers, but twice as high. It was never to be - but what would Gaudí have done for Manhattan? Would it have compared to what he did for Barcelona?
To see a Gaudí building elsewhere - the Casa de los Botines in Leon, say - is to see a fish out of water. His buildings grow out of Barcelona and back into it. But what makes them masterpieces of urbanity is their unshakable, magical sense of giving. They give to the city, to the people. This is why a Gaudí odyssey has to culminate among the mosaic lizards, skewed Doric columns, intestinal passages, strung-out stones and wide, kidney-like terraces of Park Güell, the landscaped park he created on a hill above the city. It was planned as a private park for residents of a posh development, and inspired by English aristocratic estates - but it's impossible to detect an elitist iota in this most admirable of shared spaces.
People glory in this place. Walking under the terraces, hiding in a watery grotto or hanging out on the great belvedere, you feel a freedom. From the terrace you look over the city that stretches to the blue sea. As it says on the Sagrada Família - Sanctus. Sanctus.
·Barcelona 1900 is at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (vangoghmuseum.nl) until January 20.