Mare meva, Barcelona!

“I’ll eat the door and you, the windows!”  If the Brothers Grimm had been able to travel in time, Hansel probably would have said these words in one of the most visited spots in Barcelona: Parc Güell.  However, instead of bread, gingerbread would have been mixed in with stone, ceramic and porcelain.  Historian Josep Maria Garrut, director of the Casa Museu Gaudí at the park since its founding in 1963 until he died, two years ago, pointed out that the architect could have been inspired in the evil witch’s cabin in the tale when he designed the Casa de la Guarda (House of the Guard).  The building is one of two pavilions that receives tourists before the quintessential picture next to the dragon makes them run to queue on the stairway in the park’s entrance.

Since January 27, 1901, when Gaudí began construction on the park, his most ambitious work as a landscaper, the Liceu offered the famous fairytale which Englebert Humperdinck turned into an opera and which Joan Maragall translated into Catalan.  ”Hansel and Gretel were in everyone’s mind”, explains art historian Mireia Freixa, “and thus Garrut’s theory could be very probable.”

The exposition Güell, Gaudí i Barcelona.  Expressió d’un ideal [Güell, Gaudí and Barcelona.  Expression of an ideal] that the Casa del Guarda houses presents the building as “one of the few examples of modesty housing” of the artist.  Freixa, head of the exhibit along with architect Mar Leniz, will team up “with the guard house of the stables in the Güell pavilions in Pedralbes.”  The colors -the original blue, yellow and green in the interiors are conserved- and the capricious forms of the building contrast with the simplicity of the materials, of low cost.  Gaudí’s characteristic technique, the trencadís (broken ceramic), covers surfaces of irregular fragments, of ceramic or porcelain found in rubble or waste deposits from factories.  The ball-shaped dome is full of coffee cups everywhere.

The building had a kitchen and a workshop on the bottom level, bedrooms on the first, an attic and a storeroom.  Built between 1901 and 1903, it was the doorman’s house for the community until 1920.  Afterwards it became a private home.  In 1996 the first step in restoration began, after which it was reopened, three years later, as an exhibition center for Parc Güell, already part of the Museu d’Història de Barcelona.  In 2009 it was renovated again to open, the following year, the exhibition which explores the house, the park, and the modernist Barcelona.  The exhibit points out Eusebi Güell’s fascination towards the architect, and the fact that “Gaudí found in Güell the promoter which allowed him to develop his creative liberty.”  The park was projected as a new urban model, inspired in British residencial districts and aimed at the upper middle class.  The lack of public transportation influenced, explains Freixa, the “commercial failure” of the initiative.  In 1926 it opened to the public.  Fernando Subiela, old neighbor on Larrard street, places all of his childhood experiences in the park.  ”Bikes, ball playing, flirting…  I have Parc Güell etched in my mind.”