"Gaudi did for architecture what Lautréamont did for poetry: he put it through the bath of madness."
"He pushed the Baroque as far as it would go, but he did not do so on the basis of accepted doctrines or categorizations."
"As locus of risible consecration, one which makes a mockery of the sacred, the Sagrada Familia causes modern space and the archaic space of nature to corrupt one another."
"The flouting of established spatial codes and the eruption of natural and cosmic fertility generate an extraordinary and dizzying 'infinitization' of meaning."
"Somewhere short of accepted symbolisms, but beyond everyday meanings, a sanctifying power comes into play which is neither that of the state, nor that of the Church, nor that of the artist, nor that of theological divinity, but rather that of a naturalness boldly identified with divine transcendence."
Excerpt by Henri Lefebvre, from The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (1991).
Photos by (from top to bottom): MaLóL, panic-embryo, klaus dolle, T.SC, and Lou Rouge.