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An enormous baby head

The theft endorser has logged on

B R

B R

— 4 min read

I’m a firm believer in theft - specifically of ideas. Some of the things that have made the United States a great world power were lifted from other nations and improved on. Much of the industrial revolution was first kicked off in the US by ripping off the intellectual property of the British.1 Compulsory free standardized universal public education was pinched from Prussia’s Volksschule system.

All this is to say, we should absolutely steal the Spanish urbanism modeled in the Eixample (Catalan for “Expansion).

Original 1859 plans for the Eixample, the old city denoted by that darker section in the southwest, adjacent to the (then) recently built park that replaced the fort. Not all of this was built ultimately, due to Politics.

“Okay fine but we Have Grids At Home”

No. Wrong. The grid here is just one component of how this thing works (and why it works so well). Look closely and you might notice each block is actually an octagon, not a square.

Those cut off corners allow for more public squares, improved sight lines, and - combined with specific building heights - ensures every floor of every building gets some sunlight. The wideness of the boulevards were designed for multimodal transport; pedestrians, urban railways, and ultimately (unfortunately) automobiles.

The first floor of every block is commercial, the second floor is usually fancier than the others as they were meant for the owner of the building2, and, almost without fail, there are one or more internal communal courtyards.

But that isn’t why this neighborhood is jam packed with tourists - not everyone is a massive, near-insufferable urbanism nerd. No, they are here for the Gaudí:

The outside of Casa Milà is cool but holds nothing to the rest of it.

Equipped with a ticket purchased online, I was able to walk past the extensive line and entered Casa Milà, the last secular building designed by the famous Antoni Gaudí.

The ticket came with a “VR Experience.” I’m well on record that I think these are stupid; you are already at a thing you presumably bothered traveling to. And indeed, nothing in the experience couldn’t have been replicated with a couple of exhibits and an audio tour - which they do elsewhere. But I was tickled they were using the Microsoft HoloLens.

Courtesy of Wikipedia. You might ask yourself why it appears this man is cupping a pair of digital balls. Well, that is in fact how you summon the menu (or in the case of the tour, the guide).

The last time I wore one of these it was a decade ago, on a date with a man who worked at Microsoft. It was not out yet, and he was trying to impress me (it did not). It would be more accurate to call these augmented reality (AR) rather than VR, as they project images and media into the environment, rather than replacing your surroundings. In this case, it projected a guide that looked and sounded3 like the Monitor from Halo 1. Besides this, the HoloLens has gone on to give intense motion sickness to the US Army.

Anyway, here are the actual cool parts of Casa Milà:

The original apartment of the owners (the Milà family) apparently were cool with dining while being stared at by various statues and pictures of intensely sad Victorian children
Keeping with how I started this post, some of the best stuff Gaudí put out was ripped off/inspired by nature. In the case of this attic, the ribs of a whale.
Not even the otherwise mundane water storage and chimneys required for such a building were safe from the artist. The ugly fencing is necessary as there is a sheer drop through the courtyard all the way to the ground floor.
Said courtyard. While as a tenant I would appreciate the light this generated, it is vaguely like a panopticon.
There were two courtyards, and at the bottom of the smaller one there is an enormous baby head. It’s not part of the tour, you have to go a little out of your way to find it, and there is no explanation for its presence or other context. Probably my favorite part.

  1. They did not care for this. ↩

  2. This started to shift to the more recognizable top floor penthouse when elevators and some exceptions to the height restrictions were introduced. ↩

  3. It didn’t, however, try to convince me to push a button that would kill all sentient life in the galaxy. Rest assured I probably wouldn’t have if given the offer, depending on how much US politics I had recently been exposed to. ↩

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