Tales from two cities

I would like to comment on the article titled Misunderstood architect Gaudi now toast of Barcelona in The Jakarta Post of Jan. 9, 2003.

It is quite understandable why former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau was so outraged by Gaudi's style that he immediately left Barcelona, abandoning a forum at which he was due to speak. There was such a big contrast between the Paris and Barcelona of more than 100 years ago, when Paris began its construction of the 320-meter Eiffel Tower for the 1889 Expo -- a real symbol of secular modernity -- while Barcelona had its Antoni Gaudi begin building La Sagrada Familia in 1894, a symbol of Middle Ages religiosity, not of the Renaissance spirit.

Avant Garde is certainly a misnomer for La Sagrada Familia, the style of which -- especially its facade -- is so regressively medieval that it reminds people of the bloody religious wars and persecution during the Middle Ages in Europe, and also of Spanish religious zealots killing and looting millions of indigenous peoples to convert them to Christianity in the Americas, including the Mexican Aztecs (Mayans), the Peruvian Incas and beyond.

Yet, the beauty and charm of Paris can be discovered at the Eiffel Tower. Attesting to this are the beautiful sentences written by Mexican poet, ambassador and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Octavio Paz, in his book In Light of India, in praise of Paris: "I was exploring the city that is probably the most beautiful example of the genius of our civilization: solid without heaviness, huge without gigantism, tied to the earth but with a desire for flight...

"A square, an avenue, a group of buildings -- tension turns to harmony, a pleasure for the eyes and for the mind. Paris is a city...that, more than invented, is reconstructed by memory and the imagination."

At best, I can say Gaudi is gaudy; and strangely medieval has been misunderstood as modern.

SIA KA-MOU

Jakarta