If there are gods here, they are made of light. Bolide deities, released from prismatic stained glass, collide and break over the central chamber. I’m transported back to finding a wine bottle on a beach as a child and the dumbfounded amazement as the light leaked its filtered green iridescence. The effect here is exploded into a thousand variations of this theme, it’s the harlequin backflipping at a carnival, a drift of red butterflies singularly moving on a warm breeze across a field of lavender. “The light is addictive, I just want to return to the hall again and again,” mother said and she's so right. How the architecture itself warps and weaves the light, a bright caterpillar green on the alcoves deepens to a field of grass where momentarily a cloud has passed over.
How one architect could conceive of this is simply astounding. Gaudi has made a mesmerising theatre where the play is as tumultuous as the weather. One really could return a thousand times and see something different in the glass, on the floors and on the bodies of those passing by. The cut of the glass itself is a curiosity. At some points the bisecting pieces appear as sails in strong winds, bending and billowing outwards, at others I can see faces - in one a red macaw stares out of the sill, on another a golden Viking stands over the sun shattered water with hands splayed in thankful prayer. There are so many eyes, elliptical with no pupil; rather than receiving the light their new purpose it to let it burst from their gaze, wildly breaking over the onlookers.
I write this, returning to London on the train as dusk falls, I feel more conscious of the light. How jaundiced the evening, the sunset caught behind the backdrop of overhanging cloud. The cold watery light of the carriage that coats everything in its searing oil. The streets we pass themselves caught like flies in the amber of the sodium street lamps. I am ruined!
