Antoni Gaudí: When Stone Learned How to Grow

In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí is summoned before the Court of Straight Lines, where the judge is a white wall without a window, the ceiling sits flat for fear of changing its height and the columns stand in identical rows. Asked why he will not build like everyone else, he answers that nature never made identical trees, then sets down a model hung upside down with strings, chains and weights so he can hear what gravity says before asking stone to obey it. A tree walks into the courtroom calling itself the oldest engineer in the chamber, and Gaudí draws a column that branches near the ceiling, while light passing through stained glass turns the columns of the Sagrada Família into trees at dawn. As the towers rise slowly, the basilica asks whether he will stay until she is finished, and he answers that it is enough for a great work to be given an honest direction; after his death the workshop stays open and computers take the place of strings and plaster models. The closing pages draw the lesson for the reader, with bone, tree, cave and light as his teachers, and an invitation to ask how a tree or a shell carries itself and to listen to stone until it can be heard growing.