Antoni Gaudí. Jeremy Roe
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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.
4. Episcopal Palace of Astorga, General view of façade.
5. Finca Güell, Ladon, the guardian of the Gardens of the Hesperides (dragon detail).
6. Temple of Sagrada Familia, Sculptures on the old façade.
In 1867, accompanied by his childhood friends Eduardo Toda and José Ribera Sans, Gaudí visited the ruins of the twelfth-century monastery. Documentary evidence of their visits records their imaginative impressions: the Manuscrito de Poblet, written by Toda in 1870, lists their plans to restore the crumbling remains into an utopian cooperative, attracting the necessary labour force as well as a community of artists and writers,