pre-barcelona.

At thirteen we all love Warhol, so bright! so colourful! so easy! We all hate Picasso 'cause we don't get it. At fifteen we love Dali, so absurd! So staggering! so difficult! Look at his moustache, guffaw. Then we're told that only teenagers and people who don't know about art like Dali. Betwixt fifteen and eighteen there's a convoluted photography phase (self, portraits, high contrast, people's feet, lomography) before we discover Egon Schiele and feel self-satisfied, sophisticated, brutal, tea stained. Variations apply, of course... as do parallels. Like taste in cinema, like taste in architecture.

Architecture students in Sao Paulo are a breed of young people unto themselves, hard working, semi-bourgeois bohemians, sipping gin and tonics mid-morning. Idiosyncratic interests in music and lovers, obsessed with their subject matter.

I'm thinking of this in the run-up to Barcelona. People often travel places only to confirm what they already know, so I've tried to keep my understanding of the place peripheral. But I can't help but think of matters of taste, matters of cinema, maturity and architecture.

I think because friends who have been are all architecture students, also because, to them, Barcelona and Gaudi were like the Dali phase, so absurd, so staggering, so difficult.

...they've totally moved on to brutal, sophisticated Berlin.

Minimalism or post-modernism probably comes next, something quiet and anonymous, something clean, clean cut, like typography. Something scandinavian perhaps. Stay tuned.