When I moved to Barcelona 30 years ago, I would pass, with studied indifference, the many buildings by architect Antoni Gaudí scattered around the city. In arguments about his unfinished basilica, the Sagrada Família, I liked to echo George Orwell’s throwaway comment: “One of the most hideous buildings in the world....I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up.”
Then, several years ago, a friend responded: “Well, maybe, but don’t you like unorthodox extravaganzas in a city? Are you saying you prefer repetitive, dull city blocks?” It was a moment of illumination. I realized how philistine Orwell’s remark was, and how superficial I was to quote him unthinkingly. You can hate or love Gaudí’s work, but indifference is just a pose. Jolted, for the first time I began to not just walk on by but to look at his buildings.
The life of Gaudí, who was born in 1852 and died in 1926, is an extreme example of disjuncture between a person and their art. A Catholic of daily Mass and Lenten fasts, he had an artistic imagination that was free, chaotic, and eclectic. He was bad-tempered and surly, yet his buildings are joyous and colorful. He was dogmatically right-wing in his opinions, yet he became an entirely original, revolutionary architect.
You can hate or love Antoni Gaudí’s work, but indifference is just a pose.
Many of his buildings impress because of their size. The Güell Palace (1886–88) resembles a medieval fortress. The Casa Milà (1906–10), on the Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona’s most fashionable avenue, has a street front nearly 280 feet long. At 4,340 square feet, the owners’ apartment on the first floor is the biggest I’ve ever heard of. His 1909 plan for the Hotel Attraction in Manhattan (alas, never built) would have reached over 1,180 feet, almost as high as the Empire State Building. The size of Gaudí’s creations means he cannot be ignored.
Yet it was the detail that turned me into an admirer. He asked Amàlia Godó, the owner of his Casa Batlló (1904–6), how many men and women would be living there, as he wished to design chairs that would fit differently shaped bodies. The Casa Milà, just up the street from the Casa Batlló, has front-door handles designed to be opened by the left hand, as he assumed a person’s right hand would be holding a key. In his first house, the Casa Vicens (1883–85), a glorious confusion of conflicting styles, he created the inside-outside room, with its recesses and shutters so that it could be open in summer—fountains outside cooled the air—and closed in winter. Gaudí was the total architect, not just putting up the walls and roof but controlling every minor detail: the furniture, the garden, the wallpaper, the tiling.
These details, the side dishes to the banquet that is his architecture, return me to the person. The man of God who believed that bodily suffering was good for the soul was not as austere as he appears. On the Nativity façade of his Sagrada Família basilica, a donkey, an owl, geese, bees, turkeys, and dragonflies, all carved in stone, peek out playfully from the religious scenes.
There’s a popular story about how another architect rebuked Gaudí at the Casa Milà site: “Antoni, however can you improvise on such a big house?” Dead-pan, Gaudí pulled from his baggy suit a crumpled sheet of paper with a few calculations, flattened it out, and said: “Improvisation? Here are my plans.” In another anecdote, when a tenant of the Casa Milà complained to Gaudí that the walls were all so curved that there was no place for her dog kennel, he replied dryly: “Madam, purchase a snake.”
Though Gaudí was indeed a bad-tempered genius, his huge buildings and his words also portray his humor. He was not just the austere messenger of God. Enjoy the details!
Michael Eaude is the author of several books, including Valencia: A Cultural History and Catalonia. You can read his blog here