• The other New York Minster St.

    John the divine

  • Politics and humor Andrés Barba and 'La risa canibal'

On a Manhattan lot, an architect sets fire to a vault and lets it burn for more than four hours in front of police and members of the City Council.

When it is turned off, it places 50 tons of weight on it to demonstrate its fire resistance.

That 1897 New York fault is the work of Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908), the Valencian who built some of the iconic buildings of New York (the Grand Central Terminal, the Queensboro Bridge or the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

e) and that he had the audacity to

patent an ancient construction system

-the medieval partitioned vault- to which he added Portland cement. Completely forgotten in Spain, beyond some academic circles,

Guastavino participated in the construction of more than 1,000 buildings in the United States

.

He was not its architect, but he was the builder who created and shaped the space: the Spaniard who put the vault on American architecture and turned it

historical

.

But Guastavino was also a character worthy of the best picaresque tradition: a scoundrel who swindled $ 40,000 (today would be around 400,000) and fled Spain, a donjuán (at 17 he got his cousin Pilar pregnant, they married and had children but went to the United States with his mistress Paulina, the children's governess), a

sybarite

wine producer (he set up a winery in Huesca and also his own vineyards in North Carolina) and a violinist in his spare time.

His fascinating figure is resurrected from literature with the biography of Andrés Barba

Life of Guastavino and Guastavino

(Anagrama) and the novel by Javier Moro

Fireproof

(Espasa). "Is Guastavino a national hero? The one who lived a Spanish American dream? There is the temptation to turn him into a perfect character, but Guastavino is too

outsider,

with a point of delirium and genius.

There are also huge information targets in your life.

He is a classic antihero, very typical of Berlanga's films.

Seductive and cheeky, a climber ... And a visionary: he brought the modernist character to North American architecture ", says Andrés Barba, who has written a short, ironic and delicious literary biography, barely 100 pages, in the best Borges tradition, De Quincey or Michon. "With the same data, multiple possible biographies could be written, all credible.

But like any historical narrative, the biography is a fiction ", warns Barba. And he makes the reader of that fiction an accomplice:"

We find it so funny, so Spanish, that it scammed $ 40,000.

We love thieves, let's be clear

"We love bulletin thieves and Guastavino was (sometimes) one of them." When he arrived in New York, after the scam and dragging a nine-year-old boy around the world, he was deeply depressed that people spit on the street and chew tobacco!

All the verisimilitude of a life is in those little details ", considers Barba. But Guastavino's story unfolds with another Rafael Guastavino, his son (the only one who took him to the United States) who turned out to be

morally opposite

to the father and who signed some of the most notable works of the company: the Plaza Hotel, the old Madison Square Garden or Columbia University.

"Guastavino's life is actually double: that of the father and that of the son, they cannot be separated," says Barba.

"Are two.

Father and son competed

and they rivaled.

Rafaelito was very talented.

And it was the father who taught him, almost like medieval apprentices.

Sometimes it is difficult to establish where one ends and the other begins ", agrees Javier Moro, who has voiced Rafaelito in

Fireproof

.

It is the son who explains the father's biography in the first person;

and his own (also with folkloric overtones: on his trip to Spain he escaped boarding the

Titanic

, although he had the tickets reserved for months).

Fireproof

it is more than a novel.

In the absence of biographical essays or in-depth treatises on Guastavino, Javier Moro embarked on a hazardous journey that took him from Sigüenza to Fort Myers (Florida) to find unpublished letters that completely change the official story.

According to the records, Rafaelito was the fourth child of Guastavino's legitimate wife, Cousin Pilar (although they were not by blood, she was adopted by his uncle Ramón).

Already with separate lives and with Guastavino living with his lover Paulina Roig,

Pilar left for Argentina with three children, leaving Rafaelito alone

with the father.

"It's a gesture that doesn't make any sense," Moro points out. In the unpublished letters, Moro discovered that "

Rafaelito was Paulina's son, not Pilar's!

Guastavino had lived a double life and had even registered Rafaelito as his legitimate son. "In his novel, whose axis is the father-son relationship, Rafaelito discovers his origins. How did he get to those unpublished letters?" It was a carom.

I visited a descendant of the Guastavino family, Amparo Donderis, who is an archivist in Sigüenza.

She put me in touch with an American cousin of hers, James Black, who had just inherited some letters.

So I traveled to Florida and he showed me a hundred missives that even he hadn't read because they were in Spanish ... The first one I read was from Paulina and he referred to Rafaelito as

'the son of my womb'

", says Moro. After Paulina, who did not adapt to life in the United States and returned to Spain, came the Mexican Francisca, 15 years younger than Guastavino, lover and blackmailer, from whom Moro has also found letters." There is a historian job in this novel.

At first I had many doubts ... Who is going to be interested in the life of an architect?

I didn't see the commercial side of it, until I discovered those letters ... ", admits Moro, who has traveled to all the places in Guastavino, including

the estate in Black Mountain (Asheville) where he retired in his later years

.

He himself built his mansion, known as The Spanish Castle.

"

On Sundays he cooked paella

and invited friends and neighbors.

He also had his own winery and made cider and wine, "says Moro. From the Boston Library to the Nebraska Capitol, Guastavino's trail has been left in hundreds of vaults. And his life already has the novel (and biography) it deserved. .

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