Architecture & Famous Architects
Clayton Way
Antoni GaudÃ
Antoni Gaudà was born on June 25th 1852 in Reus, Spain, and died June 10th 1926, Barcelona. He was a Catalan architect whose distinctive style is characterised by freedom or form, voluptuous colour and texture, and organic unity. Gaudà worked almost entirley 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.
Gaudà 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; Gaudà never married. Showing an early interest in architecture, he went to Barcelona in 1869/70 to study, then the political and intellectural centre of Catalonia as well as Spain's most modern city. He didnt graduate until eight years later, due to his studies being interrupted by millitary service and other intermittent activities.
GaudÃ's style of architecture went through several phases. On emergence from The
Provincial School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1878, he practised 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 geomectric
masses, the surfaces of which were highly animated with patterned brick or stone,
ceramic tiles, and floral or reptilian metalwork. The general effect, although not
the details, was Moorish - Spains special mixture of Muslim and Christian design.
Examples of his Moorish style are the Casa Vicens (1878-80), El Capricho (1883-85) as well as the Güell Estate and Güell Palace of the later 1880's, all but El Capricho located in Barcelona. Next, Gaudà 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 in Barcelona (1898-1904). But after 1902 his designs elude conventional stylistic nomenclature.
Except for certain overt symbols of nature or religion, GaudÃ'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 had come to be called equilibrated - that is, a structure designed to stand on its own without internal bracing and external butressing - or as Gaudà observed, as a tree stands. Among the primary elements of his system were piers and columns that tilt to transmit diagonal thrust, and thin-shell, laminated tile vaults that exert very little thrust. Gaudà 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, Gaudà was an important participant in the Renaixenca, 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 Renaixenca in Barcelona was the church of the holy family, a project that was to occupy Gaudà throughout his entire career. He was commisioned 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 of his 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 GaudÃ's death,work continued on the Sagrada Familia. 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 of its four towers was finished at his death), Gaudà equilibrated the cathedral-Gothic style beyond recognition into a complexly symbolic forest of helicoidal piers, hyperboloid vaults and sidewalls, as well as a hyperbolic paraboloid roof that boggle the mind and outdo the bizarre concrete shells built throughout the world in the 1960's by engineers and architects inspired by GaudÃ.
Apart from this and a similar, often uncritical, admiration for Gaudà by Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors, GaudÃ's influence was quite local, represented mainly by a few devotees of his equilibrated structure. He was ingored during the 1920's and '30's, 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 boundaries and tenacious imagination that he used to attack each design challenge with which he was presented.
The architectural work of Gaudà is remarkable for its range of forms, textures, and polychromy as well as for the free, expressive way in which these elements of his art seem to be composed. The complex geometries of a Gaudà building is so coinside with its architectural structure that a 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 GaudÃ; his personal and professional lives were one, and his collected comments about the art of buildings are essentially aphorisms about the art of living. He was totally dedicated to architecture, which for him was a totality of many arts.
