Background
Antoni Gaudi was born in 1852 in Riudoms or Reus, to the coppersmith Francesc Gaudí i Serra and Antònia Cornet i Bertran. He was the youngest of five children, of whom three survived to adulthood: Rosa (1844–1879), Francesc and Antoni.
1910
Gaudí and Eusebi Güell on a visit to the Colònia Güell (1910).
1915
Gaudí shows the Sagrada Família to the Papal nuncio, Cardinal Francesco Ragonesi (1915). On that occasion, Monsegnor Ragonesi considered Gaudí "The Dante of architecture".
1926
Gaudí's funeral (12 June 1926).
In 2008 the Gaudí Awards were launched in his honour, organised by the Catalan Film Academy to award the best Catalan films of the year.
1910
Gaudí and Eusebi Güell on a visit to the Colònia Güell (1910).
1915
Gaudí shows the Sagrada Família to the Papal nuncio, Cardinal Francesco Ragonesi (1915). On that occasion, Monsegnor Ragonesi considered Gaudí "The Dante of architecture".
1926
Gaudí's funeral (12 June 1926).
In 2008 the Gaudí Awards were launched in his honour, organised by the Catalan Film Academy to award the best Catalan films of the year.
Gaudí (in the background) with his father (center), his niece Rosa and doctor Santaló during a visit to Montserrat (1904).
Gaudí and Eusebi Güell on a visit to the Colònia Güell (1910).
Gaudí shows the Sagrada Família to the Papal nuncio, Cardinal Francesco Ragonesi (1915).
Gaudi, the man | Casa Mila Barcelona.
(The salamander in Park Güell has become a symbol of Gaudí...)
The salamander in Park Güell has become a symbol of Gaudí's work.
Antoni Gaudi was born in 1852 in Riudoms or Reus, to the coppersmith Francesc Gaudí i Serra and Antònia Cornet i Bertran. He was the youngest of five children, of whom three survived to adulthood: Rosa (1844–1879), Francesc and Antoni.
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 admirer, 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.
Gaudí's work enjoys global popularity and continuing admiration and study by architects. His masterpiece, the still-incomplete Sagrada Família, is the most-visited monument in Spain. Between 1984 and 2005, seven of his works were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. Gaudí's Roman Catholic faith intensified during his life and religious images appear in many of his works. This earned him the nickname "God's Architect" and led to calls for his beatification.
In 2008 the Gaudí Awards were launched in his honour, organised by the Catalan Film Academy to award the best Catalan films of the year.
Antoni Gaudí was a staunch Catholic.
The conservative and religious character of his political thought was closely linked to his defence of the cultural identity of the Catalan people.
Undoubtedly the style that most influenced him was the Gothic Revival, promoted in the latter half of the 19th century by the theoretical works of Viollet-le-Duc. The French architect called for studying the styles of the past and adapting them in a rational manner, taking into account both structure and design. Nonetheless, for Gaudí the Gothic style was "imperfect", because despite the effectiveness of some of its structural solutions it was an art that had yet to be "perfected". In his own words: Gothic art is imperfect, only half resolved; it is a style created by the compasses, a formulaic industrial repetition. Its stability depends on constant propping up by the buttresses: it is a defective body held up on crutches. (...) The proof that Gothic works are of deficient plasticity is that they produce their greatest emotional effect when they are mutilated, covered in ivy and lit by the moon.
Quotations: "Men may be divided into two types: men of words and men of action. The first speaks; the latter act. I am of the second group. I lack the means to express myself adequately. I would not be able to explain to anyone my artistic concepts. I have not yet concretised them. I never had time to reflect on them. My hours have been spent in my work."
In 1899 Gaudí joined the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc (Saint Luke artistic circle), a Catholic artistic society founded in 1893 by the bishop Josep Torras i Bages and the brothers Josep and Joan Llimona. He also joined the Lliga Espiritual de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat (spiritual league of Our lady of Montserrat), another Catholic Catalan organisation.
Gaudí was a kid with a frail health. Among others conditions, he suffered from childhood rheumatism, which gave him a somewhat withdrawn and reserved character. For this reason, and probably because his fervent religious beliefs, he became a vegetarian. He even underwent severe fasting, almost putting at risk his life (he fell severely ill in 1894, when he was 38 years old.
It is said that he followed the advices of Doctor Kneipp, a German priest who believed in natural medicine and hydrotherapy. Gaudí refused any medical help for his aliment, subsisting only on strict diets such as lettuce leaves sprinkled with olive oil and some nuts. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the healthiest way to approach the diet, and it occasionally led to more serious illnesses.
Physical Characteristics: Gaudí's personal appearance - Nordic features, blond hair and blue eyes - changed radically over the course of time. As a young man, he dressed like a dandy in costly suits, sporting well-groomed hair and beard, indulging gourmet taste, making frequent visits to the theatre and the opera and visiting his project sites in a horse carriage. The older Gaudí ate frugally, dressed in old, worn-out suits, and neglected his appearance to the extent that sometimes he was taken for a beggar, such as after the accident that caused his death.
Quotes from others about the person
Le Corbusier: "What I saw in Barcelona – Gaudí – was the work of such strength, such faith, of an extraordinary technical capacity, manifested during a whole life of genius; of a man who carved the stones before his eyes in well thought out pattern. Gaudí is the ‘builder’ of the turn of the century, a man adept with stone, iron and brick. His glory is seen today in his country. Gaudí was a great artist; only those who move the sensitive hearts of gentle people remain. But they are mistreated in the course of their lives, misunderstood or accused of sin toward the mode of the day. Architecture’s significance is shown when there dominates evidence of lofty intentions that triumph over all the problems in the line of fire (structure, economy, technique, utility). Thanks to interior preparation, architecture is the fruit of character – just that, a manifestation of character."
Louis Sullivan: "Sagrada Familia...is the greatest piece of creative architecture in the last twenty-five years. It is spirit symbolised in stone!"
Gaudí devoted his life entirely to his profession, remaining single.
