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CONTENTS

Essential Gaudí

Perspectives on the Life of Antoni Gaudí

Gaudí’s Childhood

Architectural Studies in Barcelona

Gaudí’s Character and Thought

Architecture and Catalan Identity

Religion and Spirituality

Gaudí’s Death and Barcelona’s Tributes to his Life

Gaudí’s Barcelona

Gaudí and the Architecture of his Day

Modernisme

Barcelona: The Growth of a Modern City

Theories of Architecture and the Search for a Modern Style

Architecture and Ideology

Gaudí and the Ideals of the Industrial Age

The Celebration of the Values of Catalonia and Modernity

Preserving Past Values and Practices in the Modern Era

Shops and Streetlamps: Gaudí’s Urban Projects

Transforming Domestic Space

Casa Vicens

El Capricho

Casa de los Botines

Casa Calvet

Bellesguard

Houses for Two Friends and a Painter

Casa Batlló

Casa Milà

Gaudí’s Ecclesiastical Architecture

Early Studies and Altarpieces

First Church Designs

A New Façade for Barcelona’s Cathedral

Two Altarpieces

Representing Ecclesiastical Authority: the Bishop’s Palace, Astorga

A Contemplative Style: College for the Company of St Teresa

The Catholic Missions, Tangier

Two Projects for His Hometown

A Sculptural Installation

Restoring Tradition in Mallorca

Unfinished Projects

The Creative Encounter of Gaudí and Güell

The First Project: a Dragon for a Country House

The Güell Palace

The Güell Colony Crypt

The Güell Park

The Sagrada Familia

Gaudí’s Vision

The Nativity Façade

Working on the Sagrada Familia

In the Shadow of the Cathedral: the Sagrada Familia Schools

Biography

List of Illustrations

1. Park Güell, trencadís mosaïc of the bench.

Essential Gaudí

In order to understand the real significance of Gaudí’s architecture it is necessary to take into account various factors which influenced his thinking. His family background, childhood, place of birth and schooling, the historical context of Catalonia and Spain during his lifetime, his friends and relations, all form the framework for the very special and very distinct architecture of Antoni Gaudí Cornet.

However, his personality is hard to capture for various reasons. In the first place, Gaudí’s shy and retiring nature meant that there are virtually no original documents in existence that show what he was like. He closely guarded his privacy, and it is a sancta sanctorum into which the historian should not try to penetrate, both out of respect and because he lacks sufficient judgement to draw any definite conclusions.

Hence the numerous fantasies that have been written about Gaudí – fabrications that are of no historical value despite their appeal to the public, ever eager for details of the intimate lives of great men regardless of whether or not they are true. Gaudí’s family background must be taken very much into account, for the nature of the trade which his father and both his paternal and maternal grandfathers followed is very revealing. More than five generations of Gaudís had been coppersmiths, producing the vats for distilling alcohol from the grapes grown in the Camp de Tarragona.

The spatial aspects of the curved forms of these vats, made of beaten copper plates, had a considerable influence on Gaudí, as he himself admitted, for they taught him to visualise bodies in space rather than projected geometrically on to a single plane. These visions from his childhood and his father’s workshop of brightly coloured, shining, malleable shapes, sculptural living forms, persisted in his architecture.

Brought up in a Christian family of artisans and craftsmen, he went to school at the Piarist college in Reus, where he received a broad-minded and humanistic education that undoubtedly played and important part in defining his character. There he met Eduard Toda Güell, who sowed in him the seeds of a love of the monastery of Poblet and of the history of Catalonia in general.

The town of Reus in the middle of the nineteenth century was a centre of political, radical and republican agitation. Although Gaudí never left any desire to play an active part in politics, nor in anything else other than his own particular form of architecture, it is clear that he caught the strong feelings of those around him and became deeply concerned about the serious problems from which the country suffered.

He was a student during the last of the Carlist Wars, and although he never actually had to take part in any fighting he was mobilised for the entire duration.

When later, while studying architecture in Barcelona, he showed his concern for the problems of the working classes by collaborating in the design of La Obrera Mataronense, the first co-operative factory in Spain, he was putting into practice some of the ideas he had formed during his schooldays in Reus.

Reus and the nearby village of Riudoms, where he spent many summers in a small cottage that his father owned, both had an influence on Gaudí, not only through the character of their inhabitants but also through their climate and landscape.

Dry stony lands, with a special luminosity, where vines, almonds, hazels, cypresses, carobs, pines and olives grew: lands that could have been set in Lazio or the Peloponnese; Mediterranean lands par excellence, which Gaudí considered the ideal place in which to contemplate Nature, for the sun shines with unusual splendour and falls on the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees, producing the most perfect light effects. Reality in all its truth and beauty could be found in the landscape of the Camp de Tarragona under the Mediterranean sun.

Gaudí considered himself an observer of things in their natural state. His immense imagination was based only on the capacity to assimilate the reality of Nature, exquisitely lit and portrayed by the sun of that beautiful region. But we all know that the sun - including the sun in the Camp de Tarragona- shines for everyone, but it does not suggest to everyone what it suggested to Gaudí. And this brings us to a second factor, for Gaudí’s capacity for observation was a result of his being a sickly child who suffered from rheumatic fever, which prevented him from joining in the games the other children played. Isolated and alone, he spent the best part of his time observing Nature, and he realised, with intelligent perception, that of the infinite number of forms that exist in the world, some are highly suitable for structures whilst others are highly suitable for decoration.

At the same time he noted that structure and decoration occur simultaneously in Nature - in plants, rocks and animals - and that Nature creates structural forms that are both statically perfect and extremely beautiful, and are based merely on functionality.

The structural part of a tree and the skeleton of a mammal do no more than strictly conform to the laws of gravity, and hence the laws of mechanics.

The scent and formal beauty of a flower are no more than the mechanisms for attracting insects and thus ensuring the reproduction of the species. Nature creates beautifully decorated structures without the slightest intention of creating works of art.

At this stage we must consider another point in relation to Gaudí’s character. It has been explained how the concept of structure was formed in his mind from the beaten copper shapes that his father produced in his workshop. But among Gaudí’s ancestors there were no architects or even bricklayers. This meant that he was not burdened with three thousand years of architectural culture, as occurs in families of architects.

Although the history of architecture has taken many turns, and seemingly very different styles have followed each other in succession, in actual fact from the early Egyptians to the present day the architecture of architects has been based on simple geometry involving lines, two-dimensional figures and regular polyhedrons combined with spheres, ellipses and circles. This architecture was always produced from plans - plans which have always been produced with simple instruments like the compass and set square and from which the masons have always worked.

Gaudí, however, saw that Nature made to preliminary drawings and appeared to use none of these instruments for constructing its beautifully decorated structures. Moreover, Nature, whose field covers all forms of geometry, rarely uses the most simplified one which is common to the architects of all ages. Without any architectural preconceptions, but at the same time with great humility, he considered that there is nothing more logical than that which is created by Nature, with millions of years of trying out forms until they were perfected.

He tried, with much thought and reflection, to discover the geometry that could be used for architectural construction and that, in addition, had been habitually employed by Nature in plants and animals. His research covered both plane and solid geometry, but in order to follow more clearly his line of thinking the two will be dealt with separately here.

It is a well-known fact that the arch, as a development on the lintel rearranged in voussoirs, was used in the Ancient East and also by the Etruscans, who passed it on to the Romans. Arches in ancient architecture were basically semicircular, or else were segmental, elliptical or basket arches.

In Nature, when an arch forms spontaneous – on a mountain eroded by the wind, or due to rocks falls - it is never semicircular nor any other shape drawn by architects using a compass.

Natural arches are appreciably parabolic or catenary. Strangely enough, the catenary arch, which follows the curve formed by a chain suspended freely from two points, but inverted, and possesses excellent mechanical properties that were already known by the end of the seventeenth century, was scarcely ever used by architects, who considered it ugly, influenced as they were by long centuries of architectural tradition that had accustomed them to shapes drawn with a compass.

Gaudí on the other hand, thought that if this arch was the most mechanically perfect and was the one produced spontaneously by Nature, then it must be the most beautiful because it was the most simple and functional. Simple as regards its natural formation, but not when drawn with architectonic instruments.

In the stables at the Finca Güell (1884), the waterfall in the garden of the Casa Vicens (1883), in the blanching room at La Obrera Mataronense (1883), Gaudí used this type of arch with confidence and with supreme elegance, and he continued to employ it in his more modern buildings such as Bellesguard (1900), the Casa Batlló (1904) and La Pedrera (1906). With regard to solid geometry, he noticed the frequent occurrence in Nature of ruled warped surfaces - that is to say, curved surfaces generated solely by straight lines.

All natural forms of a fibrous composition, such as a cane, a bone or the tendons of muscles, will, when they are twisted or warped and the fibres remain straight, produce so-called ruled warped surfaces. A bundle of sticks dropped on the floor will form these warped surfaces, and the tents of the North American Indians are built of poles covered with skins which form ruled warped surfaces.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that these warped surfaces were studied geometrically (mainly by Gaspard Monge), and it was then that they were given the complicated names of helicoids, hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids and conoids. The names are difficult, but the geometric forms are very easy to understand and to produce.

A hyperbolic paraboloid is formed by two straight lines, in different planes, with a third line sliding continuously along them, thus generating a curved figure in space which is formed entirely of straight lines.

Hyperbolic paraboloids can be found in mountain passes, between the fingers of one’s hand, etc. The Indian wigwam referred to earlier is a hyperboloid, as is the human femur. The shoots on the stalk of a plant grow helicoidally, and the bark of eucalyptus trees is helicoidal.

Geometry generated by straight lines can be found in all the kingdoms of Nature (animal, vegetable and mineral) and it produces forms that are structurally perfect.

Gaudí noticed something else. In Catalonia, a system of construction that has long been and still is frequently used is one that consists in laying slim bricks so that only the largest face is visible (the bricks in each course being laid end to end). This process, using plaster, lime mortar or cement for the joints and forming surfaces one or two layers thick, is employed for floors, partitions or walls and also for vaults, which are warped surfaces in space and are known in Catalan as voltes de maó de pla. To construct these, bricklayers generally use flexible wooden battents, although sometimes they simply make do with two rules and a string, and the results can be seen in lofty staircases and ceilings.

Gaudí thought that if one started with two rules on different planes and built the various courses of the vault following the string running from rule to rule, one would obtain a perfect hyperbolic paraboloid. He thus found, in this traditional Catalan method of construction, the opportunity to produce ruled warped forms very similar to those encountered in Nature, pleasing to the eye and with excellent load-bearing capacities.

He achieved the same shining curved forms that his father had produced by beating cooper in his workshop – except that Gaudí used bricks laid in straight lines and then covered them with chips of tiles (trencadís, in Catalan) to give a shiny, iridescent effect.

His architecture was conceived in the coppersmith’s workshop, the result of his ingenuous but intelligent observation of the ruled warped surfaces of Nature and of the delightfully simple Catalan technique of building shallow vaults. It has nothing in common with the elaborate and repetitive architecture of history, rooted as it is in Euclidean geometry.

The architecture of architects came to a standstill when it began to be studied from the historical point of view. The history of architecture led to historicism, and things became even more complicated with the advent of the study of treatises on architecture. All this has produced a science of science, overloading architecture with theories and philosophical concepts that end by taking it further and further from reality.

Gaudí started to play the game of architecture from scratch; he changed the current geometry by replacing cubes, spheres and prisms with hyperboloids, helicoids and conoids, decorating them with natural features such as flowers, water or rocks. He changed the basis of architecture – which is geometry – and thus completely changed the state of the art.

The result was spectacular, but although admired by many it was little understood by the majority. This is why his style of architecture has been described as confused, chaotic, surrealist or degenerate. Those who think or say this are unaware that Gaudí’s architecture is based on the geometry of Nature and on traditional methods of construction.

It is clear that Gaudí used forms that had never been seen in building before, and that he never repeated any of the immense variety of features that made up his repertory; but the surprising thing is that he achieved all this by means of the most ordinary and traditional methods of construction.

He never made use of modern building inventions, or reinforced concrete, or huge steel structures, or even new materials. With these new materials it is, to some extent, obvious that new forms can be achieved, but to produce something new with old-fashioned techniques is a sign of brilliance.

This architecture that is seemingly complicated but is in fact as simple as Nature, the master of logic, arose from the hands of Gaudí like a sculpture formed of ruled warped surfaces, structurally perfect but at the same time markedly organic, alive and pulsating.

Anyone who has visited the chapel at the Colònia Güell in Santa Coloma de Cervelló (1908-15) will have felt himself inside a living, breathing structure that produces a sensation of muscular tension, with walls like a skin that must surely be warm, as if the blood coursed strongly beneath it.

Gaudí, who was brought up in the Camp de Tarragona and whose buildings are located mainly in Barcelona, expressed his Mediterranean and Catalan spirit by showing the world that there is another way, another geometry, that can produce an architecture more in tune with Nature.

It is an architecture that is logical, clear and as transparent as the light in the Alt Camp; an architecture that is not abstract but very concrete, that invents nothing but rather goes back to origins, as he once explained in his famous phrase: “Originality means returning to the origin of things.”

Gaudí not only saw these origins in the natural things of this world, but he also embellished and idealised them with religious feeling derived from the simple precept of St. Francis of Assisi, who loved Nature because it was the work of the Creator.

Prof. Dr. Arch. Juan Bassegoda Nonell, Hon. FAIA

Curator of the Gaudí Chair, Barcelona

2. Portrait of Gaudí

Perspectives on the Life of Antoni Gaudí

The life of Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) is best told and analysed through a focused study of his works. The buildings, plans and designs testify to Gaudí’s character, interests and remarkable creativity in a way that research into his childhood, his daily routines and working habits can illuminate only dimly.

In addition to this, Gaudí was not an academic thinker keen to preserve his thoughts and ideas for posterity through either teaching or writing. He worked in the sphere of practical, rather than theoretical work. Were this not enough to challenge attempts to gauge the mind of this innovative architect the violence of Spain’s Civil War resulted in the destruction of a large part of the Gaudí archive, and this has denied a deeper understanding of Gaudí the man, his character and thoughts. On 29th July in the first year of the Spanish Civil war the Sagrada Familia was broken into, and documents, designs and architectural models stored in the crypt were destroyed.

The absence of documentation limits the possibility of a searching biographical study, and it has encouraged rather more speculative interpretations of the architect. Today Gaudí has gained an almost mythic status in the same way that his buildings have become iconic. While his work continues to attract the ‘devotions’ of many thousands of tourists, his life inspires a range of responses. Besides the academic scholarship of Juan Bassegoda Nonell, for example, or the recent biographical study of Gijs Van Hensenberg, the life of Gaudí has prompted hagiographies and more imaginative reflections. In a different vein Barcelona’s acclaimed opera house, el Liceu, premiered the opera Antoni Gaudí by Joan Guinjoan in 2004 and this process of cultural celebration has taken on a metaphysical dimension with the campaign by the Associació Pro Beataifició d’Antoni Gaudí to canonise him.

The ongoing celebrations and constructions of Gaudí the man by various groups signals how in our ‘Post-Modern’ age the ascetic, inspired, untiring creator remains a key trope of creativity in the popular imagination. Gaudí remains an enigmatic figure and attempts to interpret him tend to tell us more about the interpreter, as is illustrated in the following quotations.

Salvador Dalí records an exchange with the architect Le Corbusier in his essay As of the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Modern-Style Architecture. Dalí stated, “…that the last great genius of architecture was called Gaudí whose name in Catalan means ‘enjoy’.”

He comments that Le Corbusier’s face signalled his disagreement but Dalí continued, arguing that “the enjoyment and desire [which] are characteristic of Catholicism and of the Mediterranean Gothic” were “reinvented and brought to their paroxysm by Gaudí”. The notion of Gaudí and his architecture with which the Surrealist confronted the rational Modernist architect illustrates a recurring feature in the historiography of Gaudí, which is the concern to isolate Gaudí from the specific history of architecture and render him as a visionary genius.

Furthermore, Dalí’s account aims to place Gaudí in a pre-history of Surrealism and identify Gaudí as a ‘prophet’ or precursor of the aesthetics and ideas of that avant-garde Modernist movement.

While the devout Catholic and studious architect Gaudí may have considered anathema much of Dalí’s art and writing, he may not have disagreed entirely with Dalí’s comments cited here.

However, it should be noted that to identify Gaudí as a proto-Surrealist risks obscuring Gaudí’s intellectual position, as well as his traditional religious beliefs. Considered from an historiographical angle Dalí’s statement suggests an insight into Gaudí’s continued appeal into the early twenty-first century. It may be argued that the frequent reappropriation and ‘reinvention’ of past styles in contemporary art, fashion and design has helped shape the appeal for Gaudí’s artistic reappropriations, what Dalí termed his “paroxysm of the Gothic”.

It is of the utmost relevance to note that Le Corbusier was by no means antipathetic to Gaudí. In 1927 he is recorded as saying, “What I had seen in Barcelona was the work of a man of extraordinary force, faith, and technical capacity. . . Gaudí is ‘the’ constructor of 1900, the professional builder in stone, iron, or bricks. His glory is acknowledged today in his own country. Gaudí was a great artist. Only they remain and will endure who touch the sensitive hearts of men…”

As will become apparent, Gaudí would have probably shared Le Corbusier’s sentiments more than Dalí’s. Le Corbusier’s criticism signals a different approach to the analysis of Gaudí’s work. It is examined in the specific context of architectural history.

In the course of this book, analysis of Gaudí’s buildings seeks to balance the measured architectural analysis evoked by Le Corbusier with discussion of the shifting critical responses to Gaudí’s work such as Dalí’s. The foundation for this approach is a critical understanding of Gaudí’s life. His interests and the society of Barcelona, which shaped his work in important ways, need to be considered and they are the subjects to be treated. It needs to be emphasised that in the absence of further information it is the buildings which are the best testament to the man.

3. Temple of Sagrada Familia, New towers of the Nativity façade.

Gaudí’s Childhood

Gaudí was not born in Barcelona, the city that provided a key cultural dynamic to his architecture, but he was born in Catalonia, in the small town of Reus. Biographers of Gaudí, often prompted by the architect himself, have identified in his provincial childhood experiences the origins of his later creativity. The belief that art may be an inherited gift underpins Gaudí’s assertion that his “quality of spatial apprehension” was inherited from the three generations of coppersmiths on his father’s side of the family, as well as a mariner on his mother’s side. Whatever truth there may be in Gaudí’s claim, we can be certain that his home life was comfortable and stable. The only shadow cast over his childhood was a period of severe illness. The psychological effects of this on the development of the young child’s imaginative faculties and spiritual convictions are hard to gauge, although his survival may be read as an early sign of a strong constitution and defiant determination.

It can be asserted with more confidence that this period of Gaudí’s life introduced him to four factors that would be fundamental to his career: an interest in architecture, especially the Gothic; Catalan history and culture; Catholic doctrine and piety; and, finally, the forms and colours of the natural world.

In many ways architecture acted as a medium to explore and reflect on the latter three. Besides the traces of Reus’s medieval heritage the neighbouring towns and countryside provided a number of important buildings to visit, such as the famed pilgrimage Church of Montserrat and Tarragona’s impressive cathedral.

Gaudí’s experiences of such places would have been coloured by an awareness of them as the cultural patrimony not of Spain, but the region of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital. Catalonia had once been part of the independent Kingdom of Aragon, which first became linked to the Kingdom of Castile to form what we know as modern Spain in the fifteenth century. The process of balancing unification with regional autonomy is still being negotiated today and as a result Catalonia has developed a strong sense of national identity, with Barcelona at its centre.

The fact that many of the buildings Gaudí visited were religious is a reminder of the particular role that religion played in the construction of Catalan identity, as it did in the histories of other regions of Spain. As an adult, Gaudí would identify with both a defiant form of Catalan nationalism and a devout commitment to the Catholic Church. However, as a child and youth such serious concerns were a long way off.

Nonetheless, a keen youthful interest in architectural history and a concern for Catalan patrimony provided a foundation for his later ideological position. Besides visiting existing buildings Gaudí, accompanied by friends, would also seek out the ruins of once-great buildings and the traces of Catalonia’s history. It would not seem fanciful to suggest that these excursions into the countryside inspired in Gaudí a creative vision of the landscape, stone, plants and other elements of the natural world. There is little verbal testimony of Gaudí’s youthful attitudes to nature, and we must wait to examine his architecture to gauge this aspect of his thinking.

However, the clearest identification of the early signs of Gaudí’s creative and intellectual powers are exemplified by an important episode from his youth, his involvement in a project to restore the ruined Cistercian monastery of Poblet.