Antonio Gaudí

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The Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudíi Cornet (1852-1926) merged Neo-Gothic and Moorish revival styles with the Art Nouveau style to form the most consistently original body of work by any architect of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born on June 25, 1852, in the Catalan town of Reus near Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí studied at the School of Architecture in Barcelona (1874-1878) and also profited from reading the works of the French Neo-Gothic rationalist Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Gaudí's first important commission was a house for Manuel Vicens in Barcelona (1878-1880; remodeled under Gaudí's direction, 1925-1926). Here, as in El Capricho, a summer house at Comillas near Santander (1883-1885), he drew upon Moorish sources in the polychromatic use of stone, brick, tiles, and wrought iron.

Sagrada Familia

In 1884 Gaudí succeeded Francesco Villar as the architect of the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Begun in 1875 and given a modest Neo-Gothic form by Villar in 1882, the church occupied Gaudí for the rest of his life. Built by private contribution rather than diocesan funds, it is still under construction from the architect's designs.

A small fragment of the huge project, the Transept of the Nativity with its four carrot-shaped stone towers capped by fantastic free-form terminals of glazed tile, is the most prominent feature of the unfinished church, as it is indeed of the Barcelona skyline. In the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí joined the Neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau styles to produce one of the most dramatic architectural compositions of the 19th century.

Güell Buildings

In 1885 Gaudí also began a series of works for Eusebio Güell, a textile manufacturer. These include the Güell Palace in Barcelona (1885-1889); a chapel for the Güell Colony, or settlement of textile workers, at Santa Coloma de Cervelló just west of Barcelona (1898-1915; left unfinished); and an unsuccessful housing development in the city, now known as the Park Güell (1900-1914).

The Güell Palace, with basement stables of vaulted masonry, a multistory hall covered by a pierced, conical vault, exquisite ironwork, and brightly colored tile chimney pots, combines Moorish and Art Nouveau designs and is one of Gaudí's most impressive achievements. The inclined piers of the chapel for the Güell Colony, of which only the crypt was built, were based upon Gaudí's studies of structural forces by means of leaded models hung from his studio ceiling. These piers, like those in the large model of the Sagrada Familia that Gaudí built to show the completed church, assume the lines of inverted catenary curves and thus eliminate the need for buttressing. In the Güell chapel, as in the finished portions of the Park Güell, Gaudí's mastery of materials, textures, and colors is fully demonstrated. On the benches of the square in the Park Güell, for example, he used ceramic fragments to create abstract compositions of dynamic shapes and colors.

Battló and Milá Houses

Two residential projects in Barcelona are among Gaudí's major works. He remodeled a building as a home for the Battló family (1905-1907). The Battló House is locally known as the "house of bones" because the balconies of its front facade resemble bones and skulls. The facade is covered with iridescent tiles, and the roof is wavelike in form. The Milá House (1905-1910) with its undulating facades and wrought-iron balconies in the form of sea weed suggests the Mediterranean that washes the shores of Catalonia.

For the Battló House, as for the earlier Güell Palace, Gaudí designed furniture in the curvilinear patterns of Art Nouveau, but the parabolic arches in the attic of the Milá House, as well as the undulating walls and roof of the school building on the grounds of the Sagrada Familia (1909), are more than merely formal effects. Here Gaudí relied upon traditional Catalan vaulting techniques to create maximum stability through the use of warped-plane, tile-masonry construction.

Gaudí was a lifelong bachelor, a religious zealot, a Catalan nationalist, and, to some, an uncanonized saint. After 1914 he refused all commissions, to devote himself full time to the Sagrada Familia, even living in his basement workshop there. He was struck down by a streetcar while on his way to church one evening. Dressed in old clothes and unrecognized, he was taken to a charity ward. By the time he was identified it was too late. He died on June 10, 1926, and was buried in the crypt of his beloved Sagrada Familia.

Further Reading

George R. Collins's scholarly Antonio Gaudí (1960) has a brief but excellent text, a chronology, a bibliography, and many illustrations. There are several other appreciative interpretations of Gaudí's work, the best of which are James Johnson Sweeney and Josep Lluis Sert, Antoni Gaudí (1961; rev. ed. 1970), and E. Casanelles, Antonio Gaudí A Reappraisal (1965; trans. 1968), both well illustrated. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, The Genesis of Gaudian Architecture (1966; trans. 1967), has a brief general text and many photographs.

Additional Sources

Descharnes, Robert, Gaudí, the visionary, New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Martinell, Caesar, Gaudí: his life, his theories, his work, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975.

Sterner, Gabriele, Antoni Gaudí - architecture in Barcelona, Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1985.

Antoni Gaudí attracted considerable attention for his highly original and distinctive contributions to architecture in design in late 19th- and early 20th-century Spain. For the most part his original yet often technically sophisticated buildings were located in Barcelona, his artistic career developing alongside the establishment of Catalan identity. His early studies involved philosophy, history, economics, and aesthetics before he went on to study architecture under Gothic Revival architect Juan Martorell at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura. He graduated in 1878 when the region's cultural and political renaissance—the Rainaxença—was at its height. In the same year he presented a project for workers' housing at the Paris Exposition Internationale of 1878, the year in which he also designed lamp-posts in the Modernismo style in the Plaça Reial in Barcelona. His standing had risen sufficiently to be commissioned to build the Transatlantic Pavilion at the Barcelona World Fair of 1888 where he came under the influence of the modernistas (practitioners of Modernismo), the burgeoning Catalan avant-garde. Other influences included Viollet-Le-Duc, Ruskin, and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Gaudí's first commission of significance was for the Casa Vicens (1883-8) in Barcelona, built for a ceramics industrialist. This striking design involved considerable decorative use of brightly coloured ceramics on both the exterior and interior. The latter was in the Mudejar style, drawing on Arab ornamentation and the decorative styles found in 15th-century Granada. Of considerable importance to the further development of Gaudí's career was his relationship with the Güell family of industrialists. This led to a number of significant and striking commissions including the Pavellons Güell (1884-7), the Palau Güell (1886-8), and the Park Güell (1901-14). The striking sculptural and decorative quality of the roof of the Palau Güell (which also contained Gaudí furniture) was fashioned from the projecting chimneys and ventilation pipes. He covered them in broken pieces of ceramics (trencadís) that were to become a hallmark of much of his later work. The Parc Güell, never fully finished (and becoming public property in 1923), was a residential garden in Barcelona based on English models exploring the concept of the ‘Garden City’, such as Bedford Park. The Parc Güell contained a number of organically influenced buildings and combined Moorish traditions with flowing forms, especially in the serpentine bench running around the main plaza, colourfully decorated in broken pieces of ceramics. Other commissioned buildings included the Casa Calvet (1898-1904), which also included Gaudí-designed furniture (including the Calvet chair, originally of 1902, which was reproduced as a heritage classic in the 1970s by B.D. Ediciones de Diseño). These were the first of his furniture designs to reveal a strong naturalistic inspiration. His mature buildings included the striking Casa Batlló (1904-6) and the Casa Milà (1904-6) also known as La Pedrera or ‘Quarry’. The undulating, flowing forms of the façade and the dramatic sculptural and decorative forms of the roof of the latter are amongst the most striking of Gaudí's designs. Gaudi's work was also increasingly widely recognized outside Catalonia, being exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1910, and at the Salón de Arquitectura in Madrid in 1911. However, Gaudí's attempt to build a 20th-century cathedral—the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona—preoccupied him until the end of his life and is perhaps his most widely known work. Still unfinished in the 21st century its organic sculptural forms bear testimony to Gaudí's structural and decorative imagination, rich with decorated organic detailing, much of it enhanced by Gaudí's hallmark of surface patterns created from pieces of broken ceramic. There is considerable debate about the extent to which the ongoing building programme remains faithful to Gaudí's original ideas.

Catalan architect, he worked all his life in and around Barcelona, where he was part of the Renaixensa or renascence of Catalan patriotism, expressed in a strange and wilful architecture drawing on the Islamic and Gothic monuments of Spain. His first important work was the Casa Vicens (1878–85), Barcelona, a riotously polychrome villa in which the Gothic and Moorish themes were overtly expressed. This was followed by El Capricho (1883–5), a summer villa at Comillas, near Santander, again uninhibited in its exploitation of geometry and colour. His patron from the early 1880s was the industrialist Güell, for whom Gaudí designed the Palacio Güell in Barcelona (1885–9), an extraordinary and complex building its street façade reminiscent of a vaguely Venetian Gothic prototype, with parabolic arches and a roof embellished with tile-encrusted chimneys and ventilators. Tile-encrusted too were the serpentine seats of the Parque Güell (from 1900).

From 1883 Gaudí worked on the design of the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, which started as a Gothic structure, but was gradually transformed into a very free composition owing something to Gothic, but more to an imagination fired by Art Nouveau tendencies and the structural possibilities of parabolic forms and inclined piers. In order to evolve a structure in equilibrium, Gaudí designed catenary cord models with weights that transformed the hanging curves into funicular polygonal elements from which the masons could take measurements. Even more startling was the Modernismo apartment-block, the Casa Batlló (1904–6), a remodelling of an earlier structure, with a façade of bony stone uprights carrying free arched openings over which is a ceramic-faced front from which project mask-like balconies resembling human pelvic bones. More extreme is the Casa Milá (1906–10), a layered pile-up of inwardly inclining stone piers carrying I-beams between which spring tile vaults, the whole capped by a strange, surreal collection of tiled chimneys and ventilators. The internal planning avoids right-angled rooms, and the block is one of the most extraordinary creations of its time. He collaborated with Jujol on these and other projects.

In, 1998 it was proposed that Gaudí should be beatified, an unusual honour for an architect.

Bibliography

• Bassegoda Nonell (1979, 2000)
• Bassegoda Nonell et al. (2002
• Bergos Masso et al. (1999)
• Bohigas (1960, 1968)
• Bohigas et al.1991)
• Camel-Arthur (1999)
• Casanelles(1968)
• G. Collins (1960, 1973)
• G. Collins & Bassegoda Nonell (1983)
• Descharnes (1982)
• Hensbergen (2001)
• Kent & Prindle (1993)
• Martinell (1975)
• Pane (1964)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• J. Sweeney & Sert (1970)
• Thiébaut (2002)
• Tschudi-Madsen (1967)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)