{"id":7138,"date":"2015-05-05T20:57:10","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=7138"},"modified":"2015-05-05T20:57:10","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:57:10","slug":"weekly-photo-challenge-intricate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=7138","title":{"rendered":"Weekly photo challenge: Intricate"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge<\/a> is for something ‘intricate’. \u00a0The Oxford Dictionary defines intricate as ‘very complicated or detailed’, from the Latin intricat-<\/em> ‘entangled’, and from in-<\/em> ‘into’ plus tricae<\/em> ‘tricks, perplexities’.<\/p>\n

Tricks and perplexities.<\/p>\n

When I read about the challenge, I was in Barcelona looking at intricate architectural details on buildings all around me.\u00a0 Barcelona does intricate very well. There’s Barcelona Cathedral with its decorative west facade constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries:<\/p>\n

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Barcelona Cathedral facade, top detail<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are the individual architect-designed houses in the Passeig del Gr\u00e0cia, including one of Gaudi’s, which had hundreds of people outside and inside and which I therefore passed by, and there was this one, the Casa Lle\u00f3 Morera a few doors away, which I prefer.\u00a0 It was designed by\u00a0Llu\u00eds Dom\u00e8nech i Montaner for Lle\u00f3’s mother in the early 1900s.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Casa Lle\u00f3 Morera, Barcelona<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But, for me, what was most tricky and perplexing were the bench-lamp-posts designed in 1906 by Pere Falqu\u00e9s et Urp\u00ed, a Catalan Modernist architect.\u00a0 There are 32 of them along the passeig.\u00a0 The benches are covered in ceramic mosaics, a\u00a0 technique typical of Catalan modernism (think Gaudi), and the lamp posts are of wrought iron rising up from the bench in a whiplash form, a characteristic of Art Nouveau generally (known as Modernism in the Catalonia region of Spain, which includes Barcelona.)<\/p>\n

I sat on this bench to read a city map, looking for famous Barcelona art and architecture.\u00a0 But I was sitting on something more interesting than all the tricky buildings and their perplexed spectators.\u00a0 For, when I stood up, I saw the shadows cast by the twisting entanglements of the ironwork and the complexity of the mosaic tiles over the curved edges of the seat, and realised this was an excellent way to make art publicly useable and inclusive rather than exclusive.\u00a0 When you sit on the bench, you are part of the art.<\/p>\n