My parents just returned from Spain, and my father wrote to me about the magic square on Josep Subirachs’ Passion Facade of the Sagrada Familia, the amazing Cathedral by Antonio Gaudí still under construction in Barcelona. I was there more than ten years ago, but I don’t recall noticing the square.
Magic squares are mathematical puzzles; all rows and all columns add up to the same sum, in this case 33, the age of Jesus at his death. This is not a true magic square, as some numbers are duplicated.
Readers of Steve Martin’s wonderful novel The Pleasure of My Company might recall that magic squares have an interesting history, and were evidently enjoyed by Albrecht Dürer, among others. The presence of one on the Passion Facade is perhaps interesting, or is perhaps reflective of the sort of aesthetic and philosophical ideas that made Subirachs’ additions so controversial; my father, for example, detests them. I don’t like that he ignored Gaudí’s vision and I suspect his work will not endure: its style seems to me preoccupied with its own revolt against tradition; it is indifferent to its audience.
Here is the Nativity Facade (photo by Brian Colson; more photos of this facade are here):
Although radical, its quality is primarily organic; it seems to me as though it is carved on the inside of a cave. What is remarkable is that it remains extravagantly ornate, but is not ostentatious in its ornateness; that is an achievement. Here is the Passion Facade, made many years later by Subirachs, shot by the same photographer (more here):
Details are particularly revealing of the differences, the former as lush as stone can be, alive, corporeal, the latter austere, severe, modernist, angular. See details here and here, for a good encapsulation of the differences.
Cathedrals once, and evidently still, take centuries to build, and styles changed as they were constructed, although with less speed than is presently the case. The incorporation of many styles and subsequent additions generally delights us now, and perhaps this will as well someday. But, to be very simple about it, I find Subirachs’ work ugly and dispiriting.
