Through the Billowing Bench at Parque Güell
Barcelona, Spain
image: Bing Maps
Parque Güell in Barcelona, Spain is a landscape like none other I've experienced. It is a challenge to describe this Antoni Gaudí landscape in just a few words, but if you imagine a less-monetized and more-lithic Disneyland, you will be on the right track. Grown from boulders, cobbles, stone slabs, tile shards, and grout, the Park is a fantasyland of brave forms and inventive details. One of those details in particular, the continuous, curvilinear bench that wraps around the Teatro Griego (Greek Theater), has stuck with me since my visit earlier this summer.
images: Charlene Lobo Soriano and Sam Valentin
From a hundred yards away the bench is already distinct. Its serpentine form encloses the 30,000 square-feet of open stonedust plaza and its colorful mosaic surface enframes the sloping view of Barcelona below. The mosaic pattern of the benchwall is informal, vibrant, bedazzled, and would be quite jarring if transplanted into almost any other landscape. It is not the surface decoration but the furniture's clever form that drew me in and got me thinking.
images: Jake Bellucci and Liz Castro
The bench seat abuts a shoulder-height backrest wall, which -- despite its swoops and curves -- provides a continuous protective barrier against falling to a lower level of the landscape. The surface of the seat pitches gently to this backrest and provides for relatively cool and comfortable seating.
image: Sam Valentine
Parque Güell is a generally strange landscape, but I found the trilobite-sized white bumps especially puzzling. Squatting down to bring them to eye level, a story of rainwater quickly opened up. The entire tiled seat slab, at least 700 feet in length, serves as a collection pan for stormwater. The bumps serve as guards, apparently to keep visitors and their clothing out of what must be a running stream of rainwater, and the backrest is perforated with weepholes that outlet the water to a gutter on the other side of the parapet.
image: Sam Valentine
It is rare to wish for rain during a landscape visit, but with the system dry as a bone the day I toured the Park, it was necessary to fill in the blanks with a touch of imagination. Fortunately, the narrative of rainwater moving across and through the billowing bench is expressed clearly in slopes, channels, holes, gutters, and, finally, gargoyles.
image: Elias Rovielo
