The Other Modern visits Barcelona

In some respects, Gaudí might be the patron saint of the experimental twentieth-century architectural traditionalism we at the NLM have taken to calling the Other Modern, for it is hard to get both more traditional and more experimental than the great, Catholic and idiosyncratic mind behind the Sagrada Familia. Yet, there are other examples, a bit less outré, in the city, beyond even the wonderful, florid Catalan modernisme style that Gaudí was a part of. One is the particularly late and unusual example of the church of the Mare de Déu dels Àngels, built 1942-1955 in an unclassifiable but intriguing free style that reminds me of everything from the moderne Romanesque of Parisian interwar churches to the Scandinavian national revival. William Newton has more at his excellent weblog Catholic Barcelona. Some photos follow below: