Fiat Lux

I am by no means any kind of an expert on trains, tunnels, church architecture, or construction, but something about this just strikes me as a really, really bad idea (emphasis added):

It has survived the death of its architect, a dearth of funding and the destruction of its prototypes during the Spanish civil war. Now the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s surreal, unfinished opus, faces a new threat: plans to bore a high-speed train tunnel within meters of its foundations.

“What would possess someone to build a tunnel like this next to the heaviest building in Barcelona, the most visited monument in Spain?” said Jordi Bonet, who leads a team of 20 architects working to complete the 125-year-old basilica.

In a workshop below the building, he paused next to a plaster model of the unbuilt facade and whipped out a yellow tape measure to show how the tunnel would pass just 1.5 meters, or 5 feet, from the cathedral’s foundations.

This is the church in question, by the way:

Like I said, I am no expert, but you’d think that protecting a site like that would be considered important. I’m all for a high-speed rail link from Barcelona to Madrid, but couldn’t they have found a better route?

Ezra’s got an interesting post up today. It’s about class inequality, but with a different twist — instead of looking at how the gap is widening between rich and poor, he looks at how despite the income gap, the tastes and habits of the rich are becoming more mainstream.

One odd cross-indicator of rising income inequality has been the determined democratization of culture in this country. Containers of garlic hummus and free range eggs that would have been judged luxury items a few decades ago now dot the shelves at Safeway, mega-bookstores of the kind only available in wealth urban centers now populate every shopping mall, espresso drinks that could only have been procured at fine Italian and French restaurants are now offered on every street corner

[snip]

There’s no doubt that wealth inequality has increased in this country, and that primary expenses ranging from housing to fuel to health have rapidly increased in cost. But there’s simultaneously been, I’d argue, a drop in consumptive inequality, and a significant convergence in the experiences of the rich and, if not the poor, the middle.

It’s a valid insight and one worth thinking about. Sadly, I’m off to work, so I don’t have the time right now.