Gaudí: The Saintly Architect
June 7, 1926, started as normally as any other day in the life of the architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. Leaving his humble studio at his work-in-progress, the Temple of the Sagrada Família, the old man shuffled through L'Eixample district with the help of his cane on his way to evening vespers. He did not hear the bells of the no. 30 tram as it came careering down the Gran Vía. While waiting for an ambulance, people searched the pockets of his threadbare suit for some clue as to his identity but none was to be found. Mistaking the great architect for a vagrant, he was taken to the nearby public hospital of Santa Creu.
For the next 3 days, Gaudí lay in agony. Apart from occasionally opening his mouth to utter the words, "Jesus, my God!" his only other communication was to protest a suggestion that he be moved to a private clinic. "My place is here, with the poor," he is reported to have said.
Gaudí was born in 1852 in the rural township of Reus. The son of a metalworker, he spent many hours studying the forms of flora, fauna, and topography of the typically Mediterranean agrarian terrain. "Nature is a great book, always open, that we should make ourselves read," he once said. As well as using organic forms for his lavish decorations (over 30 species of plant are seen on the famous Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Família), he was captivated by the structure of plants and trees. As far as he was concerned, there was no shape or form that could be devised on an architect's drawing table that did not already exist in nature. "All styles are organisms related to nature," he claimed.
Apart from Mother Nature, Gaudí's two other guiding lights were religion and Catalan nationalism. When the modernista movement was in full swing, architects such as Luis Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch were designing buildings taking florid decoration and detail to the point of delirium. Gaudí, in the latter half of his life, disapproved of their excess and their capricious, outward-reaching (that is, European) notions. He even formed a counterculture, the Artistic Circle of Saint Luke, a collective of pious creatives with a love of God and the fatherland equal to his own.
He never married and when he was close to 50, moved into a house in the Parc Güell, the planned "garden city" above Barcelona, with his ailing niece and housekeeper. After they both died, his dietary habits, always seen as somewhat eccentric by the carnivorous Catalans (Gaudí was a strict vegetarian), became so erratic that a group of Carmelite nuns who lived in the park took it upon themselves to make sure that he was properly nourished. His appearance was also starting to take on a bizarre twist. He would let his beard and hair grow for months, forget to put on underwear, and wear old slippers both indoors and out.
What became apparent by the end of his life, and long after, was that Gaudí was one of the greatest architects the world has known, whose revolutionary techniques are still the subject of theory and investigation and whose vision was an inspiration for some of today's top architects, including Spain's own Santiago Calatrava. In 2003 Año Gaudí, the celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth, saw an equal number of tourists flock to Barcelona as Paris for the first time ever. Expect even greater crowds if the Temple of the Sagrada Família is finished, as predicted, for the centenary of his death in 2026.
