Barcelona’s Monuments to Mankind – Sunday, June 28, 1998
The port city of Barcelona, rimmed by the bright blues of Mediterranean sea and sky, offers her citizens and visitors alike a sumptuous visual feast. In particular, the stunningly unique architecture of this grand city—from the ancient Barcelona cathedral in the heart of the Gothic Quarter to the famous modernist church known as Sagrada Familia—continues to capture the eye and hold the heart of all who linger here.
These beautiful buildings, with their fantastical facades and stone spires, fire our imaginations. They were born of imagination and stand as literal monuments to mankind’s ability to dream, to conceive, to create. They call to mind an observation once made by Antoine du Saint-Exupery, author of the beloved classic The Little Prince: “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”1
This special ability to see a pile of stone and know that it could become a house of worship separates us from other living things. All human beings are born knowing how to imagine. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, imagination does not die as we leave behind the make-believe games of childhood. In fact, the power to see new possibilities only increases as we mature and gain the experience and practical wisdom necessary to put our dreams into action.
Certainly, advancing age did not dim the imaginative genius of one of Barcelona’s greatest architects, Antoni Gaudi. In the year 1914, when he was sixty-two years old, Gaudi (who had already made an original and lasting impact on the physical landscape of Barcelona) devoted himself to the construction of the church that has become recognized as his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia. So committed was Gaudi to the creation of this singular structure that in the last years of his life he gave all his money to finance the project.
And so, it stands today—a supremely unique building in a supremely unique city that celebrates the extraordinary power of human imagination!
ANN EDWARDS CANNON
1Antoine du Saint-Exupery, The Harper Book of Quotations, Third Edition, ed. by Robert I. Fitzhenry (New York: Harper Perennial, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), p. 232.
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June 28, 1998
Broadcast Number 3,593