THE MAN AND THE ARCHITECH
Biography and histori of Antoni Gaudí
Text and photos by Georgina Castillo

Antoni Gaudí was born in Reus, in the region of Baix Camp, a stony zone, hard, earth of vineyards and olives, that prints character and strong temperement to their people. There is a saying in catalan, “gent de Camp, gent de llamp”, which means “people from Camp (land), lightning people”. When he was a child he started to observe closely the nature, because of an illness that obliged him to rest and didn’t allow him to play like the other children. The strong fascination of Gaudí for the forms and natural colors is observed in all his work and is significantly reflected in some confessions made to their collaborators: “All the styles are related to the nature”, or “The book that has to be always opened and must be readed is the one of the nature”. There’s no doubt, then, about how to interpret some of his “darings” like La Pedrera’s front or the ornamental figures of La Sagrada Família (in the Birth façade there are represented more than 30 species of plants).

Artisanal tradition of his family also influenced his work. His father and grandfather were boilerers and he inherited the empirical way to work the materials, to give them shape, to band them from a flat sheet. Gaudí was not a theoretical, he didn't adapt his work in a particular style. Like an artisan who sees how forms are created in his hands, he designed his works at the same time he constructed them. The only plans and drawings that still exist have been done by his collaborators, who attempted to put on paper the ideas that came up from the mind of the teacher in order to understand them better.

But Gaudí also learned from the Middle Age. The monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet impressed him strongly. For Gaudí, this monastery represented the splendour that Catalonia had to recover after the liberal revolutions to which he accused of all the misfortunes of the country. His first and last building for workers was the labor cooperative of Mataró. From that moment he worked only for the rich, and one of them is outstanding: Eusebi Güell. Industrial, political and prototype of catalan nobleman, Güell bacame soon the protector of the young architect. He constructed buildings for him, their family and also for his own comunity. All of them have to be visited to know the treasures of Barcelona. He started with a palace (the Palau Güell), whose roof, with its pointing chimneys and covered by the famous trencadís (fragmantary mosaic) is one of the most beautiful sculptural work in the city. Actually, Gaudí reinvented the roof, which had been ignored by art until that moment. What’s the reason why a roof can not be as beautiful as the front or the interior?

The crypt of the Güell comunity is another treasure. To design it he used a new method: the inverse model. Based on strings and scales, he obtained the inverted image, from the top to the foundations, of all the sctructure of columns and arches. Gaudí tried to create a new sort of space that remeined the primitive forms like caves, grottos, trees or burrows. The stone trees that he constructed in Parc Güell are another example of the privitivism that Gaudí cultivated in his architecture. A part from this primitivism he cultivated many other styles, from orientalism to classicism, from classicism to the vanguard. He loved the exotic forms of Orient and also the monumental gothic cathedrals, but his works are not representations of an only style, not even of the modernism to which he has been always related, neither is the result of his subconscious, although the surrealists (Dalí was a fervent admirer of Gaudí) have considered him as a subversive man who fight against the straight line oppression. Gaudí was above all a convinced and deep catholic, a defender of the sacrifice to get the punishment or the divine grace. His imaginative world came from the ideas of death, regret, liberation and obedience.

La Pedrera
Between 1890 and 1910 the architecture in Barcelona wanted to break the equality and the lacking of hierarchies in the Cerdà urban planning, that made the Eixample district an uniform grid without singular points. The rich owners who lived in the district wanted to highlight, as well as the architects. So that’s why the most emblematic house in Passeig de Gràcia, the Milà house, was born. It was entrusted by Mr. Milà to compete with his friend Mr.Batlló, to whom Gaudí had restored the house in the other side of the street. It was called by people La Pedrera (The Quarry), bacause the rock with which it was built came from the quarry of Montjuïc. The word “quarry” evokes also the primitive idea of rock, and means “castle” and “cliff” at the same time. Actually, Gaudí was inspired in the castles of The Middle Age, but he softened its appearance by the ondulating façade, which gives to the building an appearance of cave, with windows and balconies as grottos’entrances.

This softness disappears in the terrace roof, where you find more warring symbols like centurions. (they are not reproductions of the imperial soldiers of Star Wars, as we all think). The idea of Gaudí for the terrace, however, didn't come up. He wanted these centurions were watched by a sculptural allegory of the sacred rosary, a four meter height Virgin. Mr. Milá, however, didn't approve the project, because he thought it would be attacked by popular anger, because in that moment La Setmana Tràgica (The Tragic Week) was shooking Barcelona. During all the decade workers’strikes took place in Barcelona (the anarchists had abandoned the bombs after the bloody judgements of Montjuïc), but the decisive fact was another mistake of the centralist government of Madrid. They pretended that forty thousand Catalans went to fight against the Arabs to defense the spanish colonies (Ceuta and Melilla).

La Sagrada Família
(The Holy Family church)
The strikers didn't destroy the Holy Family, probably because it gave many jobs, and also because it was not a popular church like the Santa Maria de el Mar church, which was razed indeed. The Holy Family was only a symbol, an attempt of Church to recover the power that it had lost because of the ascent of the liberals to the government. A new reformation was needed. The Pope and his bishops claimed to increase the devotion of the cult to María, José and Jesus, that’s it, the holy family. A religious group bought the land in the Eixample district and entrusted the project to Gaudí who had from that moment a total freedom.

But the cult to the holy family as a symbol of the peak of the Catholicism infront of liberalism began to decrease. The private donations diminished and Gaudí began to sell all his properties in order to continue with the construction, and it’s known that he asked for alms to the rich even in the middle of the street. He settled in his studio (inside La Sagrada Família), in order to supervise the works that were interrupted more frequently and for more time. Church didn't feel responsible of it, and neither the bourgeois, more concerned about their businesses than about seeing completed the temple.

Besides, the Catalan culture started to change. Modernist eccentricities were considered as something old-fashionated, as something that had to be substitute by something more authentic, something more related to the catalan historic reality. What was born was the noucentisme, a movement that looked at the old Rome as the mother of Barcelona (you musn’t forget that the construction of the Via Laietana was carried out at that moment). In consequence, Gaudí and his work remained in the shade, as remains of a fleeting style. The workers considered it the symbol of priests and bosses, and during the civil war they attacked it in order to break the process of construccion. They entered in the Gaudí’s studio and they took away plans, sketches, letters, etc. That’s why nobody knows how Gaudí would have finished his work.

The Batlló house
The assignement that Gaudí received from the textile magnate Mr. Josep Batlló was the reconstruction of his flat in the first floor of an ordinary house in the Passig de Gràcia. He wanted him to solve above all the lack of light of the lower floors of the building. In addition to carry out the project, with the enormous windows of the low plant and the interior ceramic, that goes gradually from blue to white, Gaudí left his extravagant and exquisite print in the spectacular façade, religious and patriotic symbol of Sant Jordi (patron of Catalunya) legend. The building represents his triumph on the dragon. The back of the monster in the roof, its victims (with their craniums, bones and tendons) in the windows, the lance of the Saint in the tower, all can be easyly seen and admired from the street. But who can say that Gaudí had not a very different idea in his mind?