It is difficult for us today to believe that the most famous modern Spanish architect met his demise when, at age 73, he was run over by a tram and assumed to be an ordinary beggar for a full day before he was finally identified, too late to be nursed back to health.

Park Guell

Yet Antoni Gaudí’s pious Catholicism and devotion to a spartan regimen had come to define his character almost completely by the last decade of his life, which he devoted almost exclusively to the construction of his arguably most famous work, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona.

Over Gaudí’s nearly fifty years of independent practice, he concocted and realized some of the most imaginative architectural forms in history, all of them in his native Catalonia, which have since become synonymous with the region’s identity. The best-known – and most individualistic – representative of Catalan Modernisme (Art Nouveau), Gaudí has fascinated and inspired generations of architects, designers, and even engineers.

Today his work attracts a global following with some of the most distinctive, idiosyncratic, and recognizable designs of all time.

Gaudí was born in provincial Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Of humble origins, he was the son of a coppersmith who was to live with him in later life, together with a niece; Gaudí never married.

Showing an early interest in architecture, he went in 1869/70 to study in Barcelona, then the political and intellectual centre of Catalonia as well as Spain’s most modern city. He did not graduate until eight years later, his studies having been interrupted by military service and other intermittent activities.

Gaudí’s style of architecture went through several phases. On emergence from the Provincial School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1878, he practiced a rather florid Victorianism that had been evident in his school projects, but he quickly developed a manner of composing by means of unprecedented juxtapositions of geometric masses, the surfaces of which were highly animated with patterned brick or stone, gay ceramic tiles, and floral or reptilian metalwork. The general effect, although not the details, is Moorish – or Mudéjar, as Spain’s special mixture of Muslim and Christian design is called. Examples of his Mudéjar style are the Casa Vicens (1878-80) and El Capricho (1883-85) and the Güell Estate and Güell Palace of the later 1880s, all but El Capricho located in Barcelona. Next, Gaudí experimented with the dynamic possibilities of historic styles: the Gothic in the Episcopal Palace, Astorga (1887-93), and the Casa de los Botines, León (1892-94); and the Baroque in the Casa Calvet at Barcelona (1898-1904). But after 1902 his designs elude conventional stylistic nomenclature.

Except for certain overt symbols of nature or religion, Gaudí’s buildings became essentially representations of their structure and materials. In his Villa Bell Esguard (1900-02) and the Güell Park (1900-14), in Barcelona, and in the Colonia Güell Church (1898-c. 1915), south of that city, he arrived at a type of structure that has come to be called equilibrated – that is, a structure designed to stand on its own without internal bracing, external buttressing, and the like – or, as Gaudí observed, as a tree stands. Among the primary elements of his system were piers and columns that tilt to transmit diagonal thrusts, and thin-shell, laminated tile vaults that exert very little thrust. Gaudí applied his equilibrated system to two multistoried Barcelona apartment buildings: the Casa Batlló (1904-06), a renovation that incorporated new equilibrated elements, notably the facade; and the Casa Milá (1905-10), the several floors of which are structured like clusters of tile lily pads with steel-beam veins. As was so often his practice, he designed the two buildings, in their shapes and surfaces, as metaphors of the mountainous and maritime character of Catalonia.

As an admired, if eccentric, architect, Gaudí was an important participant in the Renaixensa, an artistic revival of the arts and crafts combined with a political revival in the form of fervent anti-Castilian “Catalanism.” Both movements sought to reinvigorate the way of life in Catalonia that had long been suppressed by the Castilian-dominated and Madrid-centred government in Spain. The religious symbol of the Renaixensa in Barcelona was the church of the Holy Family, a project that was to occupy Gaudí throughout his entire career. He was commissioned to build this church as early as 1883, but he did not live to see it finished.

Working on it, he became increasingly pious; after 1910 he abandoned virtually all other work and even secluded himself on its site and resided in its workshop. In his 75th year, while on his way to vespers, he was struck down by a trolley car, and he died from the injuries. After Gaudí’s death, work continued on the Sagrada Família. In 2010 the uncompleted church was consecrated as a basilica by Pope Benedict XVI.

In his drawings and models for the church of the Holy Family (only one transept with one of its four towers was finished at his death), Gaudí equilibrated the cathedral-Gothic style beyond recognition into a complexly symbolic forest of helicoidal piers, hyperboloid vaults and sidewalls, and a hyperbolic paraboloid roof that boggle the mind and outdo the bizarre concrete shells built throughout the world in the 1960s by engineers and architects inspired by Gaudí. Apart from this and a similar, often uncritical, admiration for Gaudí by Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors, Gaudí’s influence was quite local, represented mainly by a few devotees of his equilibrated structure. He was ignored during the 1920s and ’30s, when the International Style was the dominant architectural mode. By the 1960s, however, he came to be revered by professionals and laymen alike for the boundless and tenacious imagination that he used to attack each design challenge with which he was presented.

Key ideas

• Gaudí’s was highly innovative in terms of his explorations of structure, searching through a variety of regional styles before seizing on the parabolic, hyperbolic, and catenary masonry forms and inclined columns that he developed through weighted models in his workshop. These are often integrated with natural and highly symbolic religious imagery that encrust the structure with vibrant, colourful surfaces.

• Gaudí’s work is the most inventive, daring, and flamboyant of Catalan Modernisme (the Catalan strand of Art Nouveau) designers, but it is not uncharacteristic of the movement as a whole.

• Gaudí’s work is highly personal, in part due to his devout Catholicism, a faith that became increasingly fervent as his career progressed. In part because of this, his work contains many references to religious themes, and he increasingly led an ascetic existence towards the end of his life, even giving up all other commissions to focus on his designs for the church known as the Sagrada Família.

• Gaudí often collaborated with several other Catalan designers, industrialists, artists, and craftsmen on his projects, most prominently Josep María Jujol, who was often responsible for the broken tilework (trencadís) that is common to much of Gaudí’s buildings. This helps to explain why Gaudí’s structures often feature such a wide variety of materials, used in inventive and clever ways.

• Gaudí was totally dedicated to architecture, which for him was a totality of many arts.

 

(Article source: Various)

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