If for reasons of saving time you have to choose between video or text, don’t flip a coin, video is much better. Whoever signs this tells you. Usually the novel is better than the movie, but sometimes it happens the other way around. There is the case of ‘The bridges of Madison’, syrupy and expendable novel from which Clint Eastwood took a movie with the same title. In the case that concerns us, the thing is not about bridges, but about tunnels, specifically those 260 underground meters that join the lines L-3 and L-4 of the Barcelona metro under Passeig de Gràcia and, even more, from the latter, the yellow one, as many still call it, in a ‘bonus track’, the L-2, that is, the purple one. Someone could add here that it is only a tunnel, but if you look with different eyes you can deduce that deserves to be included in the brief but priceless constellation of brutalist architecture in Barcelona, a trend to which the Open House festival, on the least expected day, will dedicate part of its programming and its organizers would be wrong if they forgot about that tunnel.
The movie. Before we go any further, just a couple of things about the movie. Thanks, from the start, to all the passengers who were kind enough to stop their march on foot to attend the ZetaMediaLab recording team. Note that this tunnel is not crossed for pleasure. There are users of the Barcelona underground that even choose less rational combinations and transfers to go from A to B just to save themselves that journey. Come on, those who have attended the recording team must be thanked, doubly, in addition, first, for those minutes kindly given, and, second, because they leave the subway users in a very good place as people with an analytical look of aúpa.
It is not weird. Says one of the passengers. It is so long that if you turn something around when entering the tunnel, you will normally have reached a well-founded conclusion when you reach the other end. It is ‘The School of Athens’ by Rafael, but with less luxuries. The reasons for distraction are few. Most of the days everyone walks around like a Winston Smith in ‘1984’, crestfallen, who does not know what he thinks. Only occasionally are the corridor walls redecorated for an exhibition. Why a Hermitage in Barcelona, a couple wonders, with the game that comes to give this tunnel, even gallery of exhibitions. They are so young, however, that they may not remember one of the most daring advertising campaigns that was carried out in that hall. It was years ago. It was carpeted with grass all the way. Told like this, it will seem very bucolic. Actually, what are things, gave yuyu. To brutalism, a current not always sufficiently understood, ornaments are fatal.
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A prediction …
Brutalista in Barcelona is the Montjuïc Sports Palace, the work of Josep Soteras, an architect who both raised a Monuments to the Fallen and, attention, a Camp Nou. It also belongs to that stream the building at number 384, calle de València, with its giant round windows that protrude from the facade like interrupted pipelines. That building, the work of Mario Catalán, is loved or hated, but it never leaves anyone indifferent, let’s go, like the Passeig de Gràcia tunnel, a reason for chatting at least once in their life, sure enough, of any Barcelonan who is move through the suburban of this city. And here is, before concluding, a forecast. Much has been said these weeks about Glòries tunnel, that absurdity that allows highway traffic, cholesterol on wheels, to flow directly into the capillary network of the Eixample. The prediction is that, despite the economic investment, its useful life will be shorter than that of the Passeig de Gràcia tunnel. One of the interviewees already says it. “Mayors pass, political parties pass, but the corridor remains & rdquor ;. A wise man.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com