Word: architecturee
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Hughes, who has been Time magazine's art critic for the past two decades, has penned an exciting and timely civic history. In one sumptuous two thousand year sweep, Hughes jettisons the deadness of prose that most readers associate with History and instead writes with the same electric, cobaltblue style...
The civic style, if one can so compress it, was more than just a Spanish mutation of Art Nouveau, which the Catalans called modernisme. It was obsessed with the meaning of local nationality and the eternal pressure of the past. It was full of myth, decoration, narrative, metaphor: a speaking...
Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of...
So they built copiously through the three decades of what Catalans still call their Renaissance. La Renaixenca was a powerful, diffuse movement. It revolved obsessively around the issue of Catalan independence. It embraced politics, social theory, poetry, architecture. It was both progressive and intensely nostalgic. It believed in the future...
+ His architecture is that of a great sculptor -- witness the totemic chimneys and ventilators on the Casa Mila and the Palau Guell -- and a remarkable painter too: the facade of Casa Batllo, on the opposite side of Gracia, is as atmospheric as a Monet, sparkling with drifts of blue and...