Antonio Gaudí

Spanish architect

• Born: June 25, 1852
• Birthplace: In or near Reus, Spain
• Died: June 10, 1926
• Place of death: Barcelona, Spain

Gaudí is generally regarded as the foremost architect produced by Spain, but his place in architectural history is difficult to classify. Although he started out strongly influenced by medieval models, he became a prolific inventor of imaginative forms and innovative structural devices, showed himself to be a master in the handling of building materials, and is justly recognized as a brilliant shaper of space, color, and light.

Early Life

Antonio Gaudí (GOW-dee) was born south of Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain. His father was a coppersmith who made tubing for the distilling of brandy; his mother died when he was still an infant. He attended school first in Reus, including five years at a religious academy run by the Padres Escalapios; then in 1868 he went on to the Instituto de Enseñanza Media and Facultad de Ciencia of the University of Barcelona, where he received his secondary school diploma. From 1874 to 1878, he studied at the university’s Escuela Superior de Arquitectura. He appears to have been a difficult, even quarrelsome, personality, but he received a sound grounding in the Beaux-Arts system of esquisse, plans, sections, elevations, and details. While a student, he worked as a draftsman in the offices of many of the leading Catalan builders; during his first years of practice after receiving the title of architect in March, 1878, he continued to be involved in similar collaborative undertakings. The most important intellectual influence on him was the Catalan Renaixença (renaissance), a mixture of nostalgic interest in Catalonia’s time of glory in the later Middle Ages and enthusiasm for the crafts and styles of Spain’s former ruling Muslim elite. In architecture, the Renaixença found expression in a Catalan version of the Gothic style, whose special distinguishing features were small windows designed for the bright sunlight of the region, flat roofs, and shadow-producing sculptural details on the facades. Gaudi’s personal architectural hero was the continent’s leading exponent of the Gothic revival, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. A second influence that came to have a major impact on Gaudí’s work was the so-called Modernismo style (the Catalan version of Art Nouveau), with its strong bent toward parabolic arches and natural forms such as floral motifs and patterns as decoration.

Life’s Work

Gaudí’s first independent designs, dating from the latter 1870’s and the first half of the 1880’s the most important of which was the Casa Vicens in Barcelona (1878-1880) represent his personal adaptation of Catalan Gothic: a profusion of oddly shaped arches and miradors (balcony lookouts); the use in the exteriors of contrasting building materials (ashlar stone versus rubble, or brick and terra-cotta versus cast-iron elements), laminated surfaces, and brightly painted tiles; and lavish and eclectic interior decorations.

The most important turning point in Gaudí’s career came when he was taken under the patronage of the wealthy Catalan textile magnate Eusebio Güell y Bacigalupi. His Palacio Güell, located on a narrow street of the old quarter of Barcelona, is a monumental ashlar masonry building with a Venetian Gothic-style facade that remains one of the city’s landmarks. Entry is via two parabolic-arched gates, sufficiently wide for carriages to pass through. Visitors ascend from the ground level by a series of circumvallating stairways to a loggia (roofed open gallery). This central core based on the Alhambra rises to a domed, pinnacled ceiling. The cupola is perforated with tiny windows that give the impression of stars, by day from the sunlight and by night from inset lightbulbs. Three stories of living quarters open onto the core via jalousies. The interior is filled with lavish wrought-iron decorations, a recurring theme in Gaudí’s work. The roof is dotted with chimneys and ventilators totally covered with broken polychromatic tile, another typical Gaudí touch.

Eclecticism was the dominant motif in Gaudí’s work from the latter 1880’s to the turn of the century. Probably his most important commission was to design a new episcopal palace at Astorga in the central Spanish province of León; his Gothic revival-inspired plan was not carried out after the sponsoring bishop died unexpectedly in 1893 and the local workmen had difficulty with Gaudí’s vaulting system. Gaudí’s business and apartment block on one of the major plazas in the city of León, the Casa Fernández-Andrés, was a rock-faced cube, whose interior apartments were simple quadrilateral rooms lacking Gaudí’s typically lavish decorations. Other works, such as the Colegio de Santa Teresa de Jesús and his plans for the never-built Franciscan mission at Tangier, show still another influence at work: the turreted earthen castles of the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. The Casa Clavet, a Barcelona apartment building of 1898-1904, represented a fusion of the rococo of the historical Baroque with the floral ornamentation of the Modernismo style. That work won for Gaudí the first annual prize (1900) for distinguished architecture from the Ayuntamiento (municipality) of Barcelona.

The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the flowering of Gaudí’s mature approach to architecture. Its hallmark was not the adoption of a single distinctive style. On the contrary, no two of his post-1900 buildings are identical in any terms. Rather, he treated each project as a unique problem in adaptation to its natural setting. The villa Bell Esguard (1900-1902), built on the slope of Mount Tipidabo on the outskirts of Barcelona alongside the ruins of the country residence of the fourteenth century Aragonese monarch King Martin “el Humano,” is a castellated structure highly vertical-looking in effect and vaguely neo-Gothic in inspiration. Its rumble wall consists of a collage of brownish, greenish, and yellowish stones from the area; the interior is centered around a parabolic shell vault that supports the roof; the rooftop is a maze of stairways, galleries, and lookouts from which can be seen Barcelona and its port spread out below. The Park Güell (1900-1914) intended as the site for an English-style garden suburb development but now a municipal park features an elaborate terracing of roads, platforms, and viaducts following closely the contours of the land. The Casa Milá (1905-1910) was one of his most structurally radical designs. Gaudí eschewed what had become the standard design for multistoried urban structures use of an internal metal skeleton as support for the successive floor facades. The building is rather a layer cake, with each floor having its own total structure of slightly inclined piers resting on the floor below and supporting a pattern of I beams between whose flanges are bovedillas (low-rise tile vaults) that support the floor above. The rocklike facade simulates the serrated cliffs of the region; the roof is a fantasy world of bizarrely shaped chimneys, ventilators, and access stairways. A dispute with the owner led Gaudí to turn over the final details of exterior and interior decoration to an assistant.

Gaudí was a deeply religious person, and his religious feelings apparently grew more intense over time. More than half of his projects consisted of works for religious orders and churches. Perhaps the most imaginative of those undertakings so much so that his work occasioned substantial controversy were the changes he made in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca (1904-1914) to restore the interior to its original medieval condition and to make possible a more modern, open liturgy. The most technologically innovative undertaking was his chapel for the Colonia Güell (a textile-factory workers’ settlement) at Santa Coloma de Cervelló, just west of Barcelona.

Gaudí’s most ambitious project, which became the consuming passion of his life, was the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, located in what was then the outer fringe of Barcelona. Gaudí was named its architect in 1883; in 1910 he abandoned all secular commissions to devote his full energies to that task. The crypt was constructed between 1882 and 1891, the apse walls and finials between 1887 and 1893, and the portals and structures adjoining the Nativity transept facade between 1891 and 1903. The work on the towers of the Nativity transept took from 1903 to 1930. A successful carillon test was made in 1915, masonry work for the first tower was finished in April, 1918, and the first spire was completed in December, 1926, with the others following in 1927, 1929, and 1930. Gaudí left at his death plans for the lantern of the crossing (c. 1910), the Chapel of the Assumption, the main (Gloria) facade (c. 1916), and the other (Passion) transept (c. 1917). The different parts of the edifice reflect Gaudí’s shift from strict neo-Gothic to a mix of much freer neo-Gothic with the Modernismo style. In his final plans for the nave (c. 1925), Gaudí devised an innovative masonry structure made up of pierced hyperbolic paraboloid vaults, treelike inclined piers, and flattened hyperboloid webs for windows that would be self-supporting within themselves without the prop of flying buttresses.

Reflecting his interest in shaping the total environment of the residents/users of his structures, Gaudí was actively involved in furniture design from his earliest days as an architect. The evolution of his furniture designs show the same trajectory as his building designs from the self-conscious monumentalism and mechanistic gadgetry of the early Renaixença to the search for simpler forms more in harmony with nature.

Single-minded in his devotion to architecture as a holy mission for the improvement of society, Gaudí never married. Although known as a dandy in his younger days, he lived a near-monastic existence in his later years, even moving into his workshop in the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia. A longtime sufferer from rheumatism, he followed a regimen of vegetarian diet, homeopathic drugs, special bathing procedures, and hiking that gave him a reputation as an eccentric. He died June 10, 1926, in a Barcelona hospital from injuries resulting from his being hit by a streetcar during one of his daily walks.

Significance

The corpus of Gaudí’s completed work is not large. Over the course of a forty-eight-year career, he built only fifteen whole structures, and only a fraction of his drawings and sketches survived the destruction of his workshop at the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He remained throughout his career an improviser. Although he typically worked out the basic concept of a project in preliminary sketches, the finished product was the result of an evolutionary transformation that took place during the building process. In broad terms, Gaudí moved beyond the historical models that had shaped his early work to a search for a holistic architecture that would be organically at one with nature. His second major contribution was his pioneering use of polychromatic surfaces so much so that black-and-white photographs fail to do justice to the visual impact that Gaudí’s buildings have.

Gaudí belongs to no identifiable school of architecture. Although his spoken (and oftentimes cryptic) aphorisms and dicta to associates, visitors, and the press have been collected, he never formulated a worked-out systematic theory of architecture. His genius lay in the uniqueness of his solutions to different functional, structural, and environmental problems plus his mastery of decoration and the handling of color. A Catalan nationalist, he spoke only Catalan and spent virtually his entire life there. He had during his lifetime apparently no influence on architectural developments outside his native region; his admirers outside Catalonia were limited mostly to the Surrealist school of painters. Even in Catalonia his influence waned after his death. Recent years have witnessed a rebirth of interest in, and admiration for, his work as part of the reaction against the boxlike monotony of the International Style.

Bibliography

Collins, George R. Antonio Gaudí. New York: George Braziller, 1960. This volume in the Braziller Masters of World Architecture series includes a brief biographical and evaluative sketch intended primarily for the lay reader, a chronology of Gaudí’s life and works and a listing of honors, expositions, and the like, plus nearly one hundred pages of reproductions of plans and (mostly black-and-white) photographs.

Collins, George R., with Maurice E. Farinas, comp. Antonio Gaudí and the Catalan Movement, 1870-1930. Edited by William B. O’Neal. Vol. 10. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973. A descriptive listing of approximately eighteen hundred items, mostly in Catalan or Spanish, dealing with Gaudí, his work, and the Catalan cultural-artistic milieu. More references than most students will ever need, but a “must” for any serious research on Gaudí. A brief introduction by Collins summarizes the ebb and flow of interest in Gaudí.

Collins, George R., and Juan Bassegoda Nonell. The Designs and Drawings of Antonio Gaudí. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. This collection of Gaudí’s surviving sketches and drawings is an essential tool for tracing the evolution of his architecture and understanding his working methods. An added bonus is the most complete and accurate chronology available of Gaudí’s works.

Descharnes, Robert, with photographs by Clovis Prévost. Gaudí: The Visionary. Edited by George R. Collins. Translated by Frederick Hill. New York: Viking Press, 1971. The author is primarily interested in Gaudí as a person and sculptor. The emphasis is on biography, anecdote, Gaudí’s pronouncements on art, and the methods and forms of his sculpture. The volume also includes an admiring preface by Salvador Dalí and a new chapter by Collins on the sources of information on Gaudí’s personal life that concentrates particularly on the role of Gaudí’s friend and assistant Juan Matamala. Extensively and beautifully illustrated, partly from contemporary sources, partly with photographs taken for the volume.

Lahuerta, Juan José: Gaudí, 1852-1926: Architecture, Ideology, and Politics. London: Phaidon Press, 2003. A chronological overview of Gaudí’s buildings, with analysis of his designs and his writings.

Masini, Lara Vinca. Gaudí. London: Hamlyn, 1970. The text largely consists of brief descriptions of Gaudí’s major projects that do not break new analytical ground. The volume’s primary value lies in its numerous illustrations, including forty large-sized color photographs. No other work gives readers so full an appreciation for the brilliance of Gaudí’s polychromatic surfaces.

Robinson, William H., Jordi Falgas, and Carmen Belen Lord. Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006. This book accompanied an exhibition of modernist painting, sculpture, furniture, and other items and it includes photographs of more than 350 of the items that were on display. It also features essays about the work of Gaudí and other Barcelona modernists.

Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. Gaudí. Translated by Kenneth Lyons. New York: Rizzoli, 1984. This work has much the same virtues and failings as the Masini volume. The text is brief and on the pedestrian side, but the 175 photographs by F. Català-Roca many in full color are spectacular.

Sweeney, James Johnson, and Josep Lluís Sert. Antoni Gaudí. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Praeger, 1970. The authors the first a leading expert on modern art and the second a prominent Spanish-born architect have two introductory chapters portraying the context of time, place, and cultural-intellectual milieu and its influence on Gaudí followed by a thin biographical sketch. Thereafter their approach becomes primarily thematic, with chapters on “The Architect-Builder,” “Knowledge and Use of Materials, Texture and Colour,” “Natural Forms,” “Gaudí Sculptor,” and “Gaudí’s Message.” The text is accompanied by extensive illustrations.

Thiébaut, Philippe. Gaudí: Visionary Architect. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. An introduction to Gaudí’s designs, technological innovations, and building methods.