Gaudi Antoni
(Encyclopaedia
Britannica)
born June 25, 1852, Reus, Spain
died June 10, 1926, Barcelona
Spanish Antonio Gaudí Y Cornet Catalan architect whose distinctive
style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous colour and
texture, and organic unity. Gaudí worked almost entirely in or near
Barcelona. Much of his career was occupied with the construction of
the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia), which was
unfinished at his death in 1926.
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 1869/70to
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 inthe 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 tilevaults that exert
very little thrust. Gaudí applied his equilibrated system to two
multistoried Barcelona apartment buildings: the Casa Batlló
(1904–06), a renovationthat 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 metaphorsof 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 towerswas 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
boundlessand 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 withits 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 theart of living. He was totally dedicated to
architecture, which for him was a totality of many arts.
George R. Collins
