Why the architect Antoni Gaudi remains unmatched

Barcelona - Gaudi's Casa Mila, a set on Flickr.

God’s Engineer

As celebrity architects create increasingly fantastical cityscapes, it’s worth remembering why Gaudí remains unmatched.
By P. J. O'Rourke

What is admired as whimsy could be awful as fact—real slithy toves in an actual wabe. The shapes of 21st-century architecture are increasingly whimsical. (Two words—Frank Gehry—suffice to describe the trend.) I’ve been looking at flighty modern buildings in Los Angeles, Shanghai, London, and Dubai. They put me in mind of the Barcelona architect of a hundred years ago, Antoni Gaudí. And they remind me why, although I am entranced by Gaudí’s work, I’ve always been reluctant to go see it. Finally I give in. Maybe an inspection of Gaudí will help me understand the new oddball global cityscapes.

The exemplarily fantastical Casa Batlló, from 1906, is a six-story townhouse on Passeig de Gràcia, which is very much Barcelona’s Park Avenue. The roof is an ocean swell thickly rippled with ceramic tiles that undulate in colors as well as curves. Vertical waves, gentle rollers, shape a facade encrusted with the mosaic technique Gaudí developed, trencadís. Hundreds of thousands of bright bits of china and glass are splayed in clumps and bunches: flotsam and jetsam (or a bad sun rash) as ornament. Interspersed in the trencadís, decorating the decor, is a picnic litter of plates splashed in motley glazes. Columns on the lower floors are modeled on human bones. Each props open a whale-jaw rictus of cast concrete. The upper-floor balconies are sheet metal hammered into pelvic girdles with strips of twisted steel like seaweed fluttering from each hip. The effect should be Casa Davy Jones’s Locker. But Casa Batlló is beautiful. And it fits right into the neighborhood. Only a genius could have pulled this off.

Once in, I want to move in—aspirationally and kinetically. The hall streams. The stairs surge. There are no edges, no corners. Walls glide into ceilings. Rooms flow into rooms. It is a peristalsis house. But light, cheer, air, and comfortable proportions are everyplace. The design is meant fully for people and, what with all the tourists, is full of them. They are in good spirits, as the spirit of the house demands. Every detail is crafted to delight. Even the air shaft is a masterpiece, tiled in shades of azure, deep-tinted at the top and gradually lightening to spread sun evenly to all floors.

Three blocks up Passeig de Gràcia, Casa Milà, completed in 1910, is better yet. The big apartment building has the hard but fluid segmented continuity of an invertebrate, though its limestone shell is really supported on the kind of steel skeleton introduced not long before by Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney. Casa Milà insinuates itself into its corner lot with a lovely dead-bleached-insect grace. Some 150 windows, all seemingly different, are arranged in sinuous asymmetry. Some are armed at their sills with ferocious railings of wrought iron that, to me, seem abstractions of mandibles, tentacles, stingers, and jellyfish sacs. The roof is separately aggressive, a banked and mounded parapet with dormer windows that could serve as embrasures, and chimneys molded to evoke Catalan knights in armor.

Casa Milà is a carapace, a fortress, but a fortress of domestic pleasantry. The apartments wander through the complexity of the building’s form, so their floor plans look insane. But Gaudí didn’t like blueprints or even renderings. He preferred to work from models. And the apartments are models of open-plan living, lofts in advance of fashion, except with better natural light, greater ventilation, more common sense, and a happier mood. Few lofts today have a sewing room, and none have ceiling plaster whipped like meringue.

All of Gaudí’s works, however outwardly unruly, proceed from internal discipline. His father was a boiler-maker. Gaudí loved geometry. To determine the catenary curves of arches, he would tack a sketch of a foundation plan on the ceiling, hang loops of string, and attach weights along the loops in proportion to down forces. Then he’d take a photograph, turn the print upside-down, and get his elevation view. Gaudí pioneered the parabolic arch, with its perfect distribution of load. The arches beneath Casa Milà’s stone roof are so strong, each is built with a single course of upended bricks.

Gaudí also had a sense of proportion. Every design is sized to the effect intended. Casa Milà, for example, should be scary. But it’s too human in scope and scale. It’s charming instead, like a child’s drawing of something scary—if your child were Degas.

Less than a mile northeast of Casa Milà is La Sagrada Família (Holy Family) basilica, where Gaudí was operating on a scale that’s superhuman. He began work on the church in 1883, when he was 31. From 1914 until his death in 1926, he devoted himself solely to the project, which is still under construction and maybe always will be.

I stare with an exalted crick in my neck at the immensities of the bell towers, swirled spires of lace made from rock. (Eventually there will be 18 of them.) It would shake the faith back into anyone to look at Gaudí’s depiction of all creation melting in love on the Nativity facade. I behold, with strained peripheral vision, the nave and aisles that hold 14,000 worshippers. And these are the least interesting parts of the building.

Gaudí considered the Gothic style imperfect, because buttresses are needed to hold up the soaring magnificence. The house of God should stand on its own. Gaudí found solutions in plant and animal forms, in hyperboloids, paraboloids, and helicoids (respectively, saddle-shaped curves, cones, and spirals). And he made use of fractals, structures that split into smaller replications of themselves, the way broccoli does.

Gone are the buttresses. Gothic gloom is dispelled. The sun shines through the walls from floor to roof, and through the roof as well. Genesis 1:3, “ and there was light.”

If a Gothic cathedral is (as some have said, misapplying their Shakespeare) a sermon in stone, then La Sagrada Família is a sermon in broccoli. And none the less powerful for it.

On inspection, Gaudí’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all. His dedication to something even bigger than the ego of an architect sets him apart from others who have built odd and surprising buildings. Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering. Critics have said Frank Gehry gets his inspiration from crumpled pieces of paper. Gaudí had inspiration already, and nature showed him God’s engineering.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/god-8217-s-engineer/8595/

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Can writers benefit from editors?

From two letters published in July in the Guardian. The first, from Giles Coren—restaurant critic for the London Times Magazine on Saturdays since 2001—to his subeditors at the Times, was leaked to the Guardian. The second is a letter to Coren from Times subeditors Mia Aimaro Ogden and Joanna Duckworth.

Chaps,

I am mightily pissed off. I have addressed this to Owen, Amanda, and Ben because I don’t know who I am supposed to be pissed off with (I’m assuming Owen, but I filed to Amanda and Ben, so it’s only fair), and also to Tony, who wasn’t here—if he had been, I’m guessing it wouldn’t have happened.

I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that fucked up my review on Saturday.

It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. They are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”

It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and I know best.”

Well, you fucking don’t.

This was shit, shit subediting for three reasons.

1) “Nosh,” as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardization of the German naschen. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, “nosh,” means simply “food.” You have decided that this is what I meant and removed the “a.” I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun “nosh” means “a session of eating”—in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of “scoff.” You can go for a scoff. Or you can buy some scoff. The sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what I meant. Why would you change a sentence so that it meant something I didn’t mean? I don’t know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck-up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? It’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, I was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually-charged.” I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y. I have used the word “gaily” as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blow job. Not specifically gay, for this is Soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “Looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. The joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a Renaissance fresco and thinking Jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking Christ, don’t you read the copy?

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, meter is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for the Times, and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time I mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word I got in all sorts of trouble), but I care deeply about my work and I hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you’ve been subbing Joe and Hugo, and maybe they just file and fuck off and think, ho, it’s tomorrow’s fish and chips”—well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on Sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. Weird, maybe. But that’s how it is.

It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. I’ve got a review to write this morning, and I really don’t feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the payoff, and I’m going to have another weekend ruined for me.

I’ve been writing for the Times for fifteen years, and I have never asked this before—I have never asked it of anyone I have written for—but I must insist, from now on, that I am sent a proof of every review I do, so I can check it for fuck-ups. And I must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way I can carry on in the job.

And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.

Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger, can make a man verbose.

Giles

---

Dear Giles,

Subediting is a noble profession. It is also a thankless one—particularly when your writers call you a “useless cunt.”

There was a sharp intake of breath when your email hit the inbox of subs throughout the industry this week—that was after we’d stopped laughing. Not that we didn’t think you had a point. Yes, tinkering with copy just for the sake of it and without consultation is wrong. It is disrespectful and arrogant. And we can see why you’d be furious at the loss even of an indefinite article.

There is nothing more irritating than a sub editor who thinks he knows better than a writer, particularly one who cares deeply about his work. But did you really have to be so rude?

If you could only see the state of some of the raw copy we have to knock into shape. It’s badly structured, poorly spelt, appallingly punctuated, lazily researched. We’re not saying your writing falls into that category—on the contrary, your journalism is highly accomplished. Never having worked on your copy, we can only take your word for it that it is beyond improvement in its pre-published state. Strange as it may seem, many writers do not possess your grasp of language; indeed, it is sometimes difficult to believe that English is their mother tongue, and they don’t give a damn about what they produce because they know that a good, often highly educated subeditor will correct it, check it, and turn it into readable prose.

None of this can excuse your nasty, bullying, “know your place, you insignificant little fuckwit” email. Yes, it’s funny, in a way that pieces that use “fuck,” “shit,” and “cunt” so liberally often can be, but, please—someone made a mistake. He surely had no intention of sabotaging your deathless prose. So you don’t like what happened to your piece—have a word with your editor. The hapless sub will no doubt already have been soundly thrashed and had his dictionary privileges removed.

Some years ago, a colleague of ours had a T-shirt printed up with the legend xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx is a cunt, which he wore every week when having to deal with the writer to whom it referred, because he, like you, became so disproportionately abusive when his use of language was questioned. We’d hate that to happen to you, because you can actually write, and having giles coren is a sanctimonious little twat who needs to get over himself could be quite costly in T-shirt lettering. Subs are no more infallible than writers. So let’s all try a little mutual respect, shall we?

All the best,

Mia Aimaro Ogden

Joanna Duckworth

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How to make crepes

Gilles Marini's French Trick for Feeding Kids on the Fly

07/15/2011

by: Parade Editors

Photo by: Andrea Cipriani

Gilles bulding a croquembouche with his father.

Gilles Marini of Brothers and Sisters shares a French trick for feeding the family on the fly

I grew up in a little bakery in France. My father would bake everything, and I was eating, eating, eating—8 to 10 pastries a day!

Whenever my mother would declare it crepe night at home, we would think, Wow, Mom is so cool! But it was an easy way for my mom to feed us, because when you have nothing in the fridge but eggs and a bit of flour and whatnot, you can still make crepes.

My wife and I do that now with our children, Georges and Juliana. We’ll ask, “What shall we make tonight?” And we usually do crepes. They’re like the French burrito. They can be sweet, like this recipe, or done with ham and cheese and eggs, or with salmon.

Crepe Expectations

Ingredients:
2 cups milk
1 cup flour
3 eggs
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup melted, unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

Directions:
1. Combine all ingredients in a mixer or blender and blend until smooth.

2. In a medium-size skillet over medium-low heat, melt 1/2 tsp butter; ladle in 1/4 cup crepe batter. Swirl the skillet until you have a thin layer of batter covering the entire bottom.

3. Cook until the underside is golden brown, about 2 minutes; flip. Cook until the other side is golden brown, about 1 minute.

4. Add a filling, if desired, right after flipping. Place ingredients down the center of the crepe so you can fold in the sides like an envelope. If you aren’t using a filling, cook all the crepes, then put them on a plate in the middle of the table alongside bowls of various fillings—jams, Nutella, whipped cream, sautéed fruit, etc.—so everyone can choose their own.

5. Dust with confectioners’ sugar before serving.

Makes: 12 | Per Crepe: 120 calories, 11g carbs, 4g protein, 6g fat, 60mg cholesterol, 40mg sodium, 0g fiber

Gille's Tips

• “If you have time, let the batter rest for half an hour before frying the crepes. And you can keep any unused batter covered in the fridge for one day.”

• “My secret ingredient is eau de fleur d’oranger [orange-blossom water, available in specialty food stores]. Put in only one or two drops because it’s very, very strong. But people will say, ‘Oh my God, this is delicious.’”

• “I love salmon crepes. But if you want to make the recipe savory, not sweet, you need to lose the vanilla extract and the sugar. Then you can put whatever you want inside.”

Where is blood used as an ingredient in food?

From Brad Farmerie.  Click here to learn all about cooking with blood.

A World of Blood Cookery

Biroldo (Italy) Also called sanguinaccio, an Italian blood sausage that usually contains pine nuts, raisins, pig’s snouts or pig’s skin, and either pig’s or cow’s blood.

Black Pudding (United Kingdom & Ireland) A sausage made of pig’s blood and a high proportion of oatmeal, which creates a dense texture. Always part of a traditional “full English breakfast.”

(Trinidad & Tobago) Pig’s or cow’s blood sausage with bread as filler plus chives, hot pepper, herbs, and spices. Often the mixture is cooked before it is stuffed in the casings. Traditionally served with hot sauce. 

(Antigua & Barbuda) Sausage made from pig’s or cow’s blood mixed with rice; often confusingly called “rice pudding.”

(Barbados) A sausage of pig’s blood and sweet potatoes, traditionally served with souse (pickled pig’s head).

Blodpalt (Sweden) A potato dumpling enriched with blood (cow’s or pig’s in the south, reindeer’s in the north); boiled and served with grilled pork during the winter months.

Blood Tofu (China) Coagulated chicken’s, duck’s, cow’s, or goose’s blood cut into blocks. Called xu douf in China, it’s also served in Vietnam, Thailand, and other countries close to the Chinese border.

Blutwurst (Germany) Blood sausage made from pork, beef, blood, spices, and herbs; sometimes barley or oatmeal is included as filler. 

Boudin Noir (France) A blood sausage containing cream with apples or onions as filler. Generally served with either cooked apples or mashed potatoes.

Chouriço de Sangue (Portugual) Effectively a version of chorizo with blood added.

Confrérie des Chevaliers du Goûte Boudin (France) AKA Brotherhood of the Knights of Blood Sausage. Created in 1963, this organization is based in southern Normandy and aims to identify the best blood sausages in France, preserve the recipes and techniques used to make blood sausage throughout France, and encourage the continued pursuit of the highest quality product. 

Coq au vin (France) Chicken, capon, or rooster braised in red wine, bacon, mushrooms, and small white onions, with blood added at the end to thicken the sauce. Same techniques used in making civet, a game stew that usually calls for hare and hare’s blood.

Czarnina (Poland) Soup made of duck’s blood and clear poultry broth with a sweet-and-sour taste that comes from the use of sugar and/or dried fruits with vinegar. 

Dinuguan (Philippines) Stew of pig’s stomach, intestines, ears, heart and snout simmered in rich spicy dark gravy of pig’s blood, garlic, chiles, and vinegar. Has earned the nickname of “chocolate meat” based on its creamy dark brown appearance.

Doi Huyet (Vietnam) A herbaceous pig’s blood sausage with ngo om (rice paddy herb), rau ram (Vietnamese coriander leaves), shrimp paste, and coriander leaves.

Drisheen (Ireland) A form of black pudding from county Cork originally made from sheep’s blood, cream, oatmeal or bread crumbs, spices, and the herbaceous plant tansy.

Foire au Boudin (France) The French Black Pudding Fair, usually held in March in the village of Mortagne-au-Perche, to award the coveted International Best Black Pudding Prize.

Kishka (Poland) Slavic word meaning “gut” or “intestine,” which lends its name to a variety of sausages or puddings. The Eastern European kishka is a sausage made with blood and buckwheat or barley, traditionally served at breakfast. 

Morcilla (Spain) A sausage of pig’s blood and fat, rice, onions, and salt. Varieties include those made with bread crumbs, pine nuts, and almonds; also varieties vary the proportions of ingredients or flavorings, producing even a morcilla dulce, which is fried and served as a dessert. In Chile, morcilla is called prieta, and in Panama and Colombia it’s called rellena or tubería negra.

Moronga (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Central America & Mexico) A sausage made of pig’s blood, spices, herbs (such as oregano and mint), onions, and chiles often served in a red or green chile sauce. 

Mustamakkara (Finland) A blood sausage specialty of Tampere made by mixing pork, pig’s blood, crushed rye, and flour traditionally eaten with lingonberry jam. 

Mykyrokka (Finland) Also called tappaiskeitto or “butchery soup,” containing myky, a dumpling made from blood and rye flour cooked in a soup that contains potatoes, onions, and offal. 

Saksang (Indonesia) An obligatory dish in marriage celebrations, this spicy preparation from northern Sumatra can contain minced pork, dog, and/or water buffalo meat stewed in blood and coconut milk flavored with kaffir limes, coriander, chiles, lemongrass, ginger, galangal, and turmeric.

Sângerete (Romania) A sausage made from pork shoulder or butt, pig’s blood, and filler such as pre-boiled rice seasoned with pepper, garlic, and basil.

Soondae (Korea) A street food blood sausage that can be stuffed with a wide variety of ingredients, such as cellophane noodles, barley, sesame leaves, fish, fermented soy paste, rice, kimchi, or bean sprouts.

Ti-Hoeh-Koe (Taiwan) Also known as pig’s blood popsicle or pig’s blood cake. This street snack is made of pig’s blood and sticky rice that is most often fried or steamed, coated with chile sauce, then rolled in crushed peanuts and cilantro. Another use is as an ingredient for the traditional hot pot, where it’s added for texture, color, and flavor.

Tiet Canh (Vietnamese) Made from raw blood, usually duck’s or goose’s, sprinkled with crushed peanuts and chopped herbs. The finished dish is refrigerated, which allows the blood to coagulate, then eaten immediately with fresh herbs and lime juice.

Verivorst (Estonia) A blood sausage similar to the Finnish mustamakkara eaten mostly in winter as a traditional Christmas food and served with lingonberry jam, butter, or sour cream.

Zungenwurst (Germany) Known as blood tongue, this variety of German head cheese made with pig’s blood, suet, bread crumbs, oatmeal, and chunks of pickled ox’s tongue—bears some resemblance to blood sausage with large cubes of fat and tongue throughout. It’s commonly sliced and browned in butter or bacon fat. 

What college rankings really tell us.

The Order of Things

What college rankings really tell us.

by Malcolm Gladwell February 14, 2011

ABSTRACT: . Last summer, the editors of Car and Driver conducted a comparison test of three sports cars, the Lotus Evora, the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport, and the Porsche Cayman S. This was the final tally: 1. Porsche Cayman 193; 2. Chevrolet Corvette 186; 3. Lotus Evora 182. Yet when you inspect the magazine’s tabulations it is hard to figure out why Car and Driver was so sure that the Cayman is better than the Corvette and the Evora. A ranking can be heterogeneous as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous. The U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide is run by Robert Morse, whose six-person team operates out of a small office building in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Over the years, Morse’s methodology has steadily evolved, and the ranking system looks a great deal like the Car and Driver methodology. It is heterogeneous. It aims to compare Penn State—a very large, public, land-grant university with a low tuition and an economically diverse student body—with Yeshiva University, a small, expensive, private Jewish university. The system is also comprehensive. Discusses suicide statistics. There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution, so the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at best. Describes the reputation score and reputational biases. Mentions Michael Bastedo. Jeffrey Stake, a professor at the Indiana University law school, runs a Web site called the Ranking Game, which demonstrates just how subjective rankings are. There are schools that provide a good legal education at a decent price, and, by choosing not to include tuition as a variable, U.S. News has effectively penalized those schools for trying to provide value for the tuition dollar. The U.S. News ranking turns out to be full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness. At a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. Mentions Graham Spanier and Ellsworth Huntington.

 Please click below for a link to the complete article, courtesy of Colleges That Change Lives, Inc. (CTCL).

Malcolm Gladwell, Dept. of Education, “The Order of Things,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2011, p. 68