At the Colònia Güell

‘There are only so many times you can be expected to look at the Sagrada Família,’ said my uncle. He was visiting me in Barcelona, where I had returned for a few weeks. He said he wanted to take me to see the Colònia Güell, a lesser-known Gaudí site. ‘You mean the Park Güell?’ I said, thinking he was after sweeping views and stone lizards with mosaic skin. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the Colònia Güell.’ I had never heard of it, despite having grown up in the city. We agreed to go early the next morning.

We took the tram, sitting in sleepy silence. The grey landscape unfolded. Low walls covered in graffiti, dark tunnels with snaking pipes, tower blocks, warehouses, farmlands, greenhouses with shattered panes. Raindrops made diagonal rivulets on the windows. They squiggled wildly whenever the tram picked up speed. On the chain link fences the occasional yellow ribbon flew by, leftover tokens of solidarity with political prisoners of the Independence referendum.

When we got out the rain had stopped. The sky was very pale. Light filtered through evenly, making the landscape look strangely bright and shadowless. There were no signs past the ticket barriers, just one long road bordered by pine trees. At the bend, a cluster of brick houses came into view, built on a slope. There was nobody around. No traffic on the road. No place to get a coffee. Leaves collected at the curb, turning to mulch. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and wasn’t used to being awake before noon. Besides, my lighter had run out of fuel so I couldn’t even have a cigarette. ‘Maybe we got out at the wrong stop,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should turn back.’ My uncle took out his phone to check the blue dot on the map. ‘No, we’re in the right place.’

We walked towards a large, clay-coloured house, with small windows cut irregularly into the sides and a big chimney of bricks that had been arranged in patterns. The bricks continued at the front of the building, where they were organised into elaborate latticework around the entrance. The walls around were made of rough rock, the surface oddly pocked so that it looked porous. It was the colour of gingerbread. If a nice lady had invited us in I felt sure we would be cooked in an oven.

We stood looking up at the house for a while. I said nothing because my uncle is an architect, and for all I knew this building was some great masterpiece.

‘What an eyesore,’ he said, to my relief. ‘Look what they’ve done. Taking idioms and juxtaposing them in totally inappropriate ways.’

‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘What’s with the crazy zig zags?’

‘So faux naif.’

‘And the chimney?’

He shook his head sadly. ‘A disaster.’

We carried on looking.

He waved his hands in front of him. ‘That texture.’

‘What’s that word for the phobia of porous surfaces?’

Neither of us could remember so I looked it up.

‘Trypophobia.’

‘Ah.’

Next to the definition there was a helpful illustration of a hand with some kind of disease spread over the skin in a pattern of small, symmetrical holes surrounded by raised edges.

‘Disgusting,’ I said, holding the phone out to my uncle.

He leaned closer to the screen. ‘Christ,’ he breathed.

I scrolled down and saw a similar image, this time of the side of a face, the skin of the cheek all eaten away.

‘Ugh! Look at this one!’ I held out the screen.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Please.’

We finally came to a tourist information centre, where a young woman behind a perspex screen charged us twenty euros for two entries. After taking the payment she explained in a mellifluous Catalan accent that because it was a Monday, the exhibits were closed, and it would not be possible to go into any of the buildings, though we were more than welcome to walk around the streets and look at their exteriors. She asked if we would like some audio guides, adding that they were free. This struck me as a perverse way to frame the situation but I accepted them anyway. She handed us two devices like old Nokia brick phones, along with a glossy brochure containing a fold-out map with numbered stops.

Outside, I pressed 0 and the guide thanked me in a smooth, robotic voice for choosing to visit the Colònia Güell. Then came a potted history of the place. Founded in 1890 by Eusebi Güell as an industrial colony, the workers’ houses were arranged around the textiles factory that was fitted with the most modern technology of the time. The factory employed 1,000 workers in 1908. There were 24,000 spinning wheels and 760 weaving looms, all operated by a 1000 horsepower steam engine. It was conceived as an urban centre with its own character and its own social and religious life, and it was Güell’s mission to improve the conditions for the workers, the voice said, before the introduction abruptly ended. My interest was piqued. It sounded like a truly terrible idea.

We continued along the numbered stops: the former consumption cooperative, the storage cellars, the secretary’s house, the convent, the union, the library, the school, and the doctor’s house. The audio guide informed me that the buildings had been designed by Francesc Berenguer i Mestres and Joan Joan Rubió i Bellver in the Catalan Modernist style, that their influences were Gothic and Arabic, and that the brick they used was typical of this region. I learnt about how the factory used brick latticework for ventilation, and to provide areas for the textiles to dry without being exposed to direct sunlight, which would bleach them.

The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wanted to know. It described these houses only as structures that let air circulate in certain directions, that let sunlight fall across them at different angles throughout the day, shadows rotating and lengthening. But hadn’t people lived inside them? There was something creepy about this obvious omission.

The feeling of unease crested outside the doctor’s house, a simple two-storey square building with pillars at the corners. After a detailed description of the cornice where the airing holes of the attic were disguised by a zigzag pattern of more bricks, the guide uttered this staggeringly creepy sentence, in the same smooth monotone: The doctor made house calls to visit patients not only to cure them, but to make sure they really were as ill as they claimed.

I remembered the free therapy sessions I received during my time working as a content moderator one hideous summer after university. My therapist was a kindly gay Chilean man who I lied to week after week, inventing dying family members and killing them off in increasingly unlikely and tragic ways, all in an attempt to get more time off work. The office was in a long glass building with a gym in the basement and a rooftop cafe where I would go along with my colleagues to play ping pong and get abjectly drunk on sugary sangría at the end of each day before stumbling home. I remembered reading about offices with built-in sleep pods and Silicon Valley work campuses so convenient that nobody ever leaves. I remembered my elation the morning that I decided that I would not go into work that day or ever again, that if I spent a single moment longer in that place it would permanently damage my capacity to see beauty in the world. This is what it finally came down to: an instinct to protect beauty, which is really an instinct towards survival. I remembered the faces of my colleagues like a deserter remembers the faces of the ones he left to die.

Something vast and inchoate was rising to the surface. I tried to articulate it to my uncle: that I found the premise of this colony, and the notion of paternalistic capitalism itself, to be false and condescending. It mimicked a utopian vision of communal work and life, but the people in it never saw the fruits of their labour, so it took on a dystopian quality, made crueller by its benevolent pretence. Even if this model town, inspired by the experiments of the English industrialists, represented a considerable improvement on the working conditions of the time, it was still depressing, particularly because it was a cruder and therefore more starkly visible expression of the kind of logic we are still living under, of the kind of existence we have learnt to accept as fair.

I don’t think any of this made much sense. My uncle just said: ‘Let’s get lunch.’

The day improved enormously. The restaurant was on a small plaza, a typically Catalan interior; unpretentious and stylish. High ceilings run with beams, glass lamps, star-patterned marble floor, carved mahogany chairs. Two old men sat by the entrance playing chess, and a large dog lounged at their feet. A whole family was gathered on a long table at the back, filling the place with cheerful chatter. The waitress came with a bottle of red wine and a basket of bread. We had asparagus pasta and fish soup for starters, followed by lemon sole. We gossipped about different family members. We finished the wine. Dessert was mel i mato and dark coffee with a shot of cognac.

Maybe it’s not so bad, I thought to myself as we made our way back out. You go to work, you earn some money, you squander it on a long, boozy lunch, and you do the same thing the next day.

Image: Colònia Güell, Renato Rocca.