Bio
Life
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 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 Catalan 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.
In his drawings and models for the uncompleted church of the Holy Family
(only one transept with one of its four towers was finished at his death),
he 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.
Assessment
The architectural work of Gaudí is remarkable for its range of
forms, textures, and polychromy and for the free, expressive way in which
these elements of his art seem to be composed. The complex geometries
of a Gaudí building so coincide with its architectural structure
that the whole, including its surface, gives the appearance of being a
natural object in complete conformity with nature's laws. Such a sense
of total unity also informed the life of Gaudí; his personal and
professional lives were one, and his collected comments about the art
of building are essentially aphorisms about the art of living. He was
totally dedicated to architecture, which for him was a totality of many
arts. |