Antoni Gaudí
Gaudí developed an architecture of his own made of catenary curves, mosaic and forms drawn from nature. Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, Park Güell and the unfinished church of the Sagrada Família make Barcelona his city.
Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852 in Reus in Catalonia, the son of a coppersmith. He himself attributed his feeling for space to having grown up among pans and boilers shaped from sheet metal. He studied at the school of architecture in Barcelona from the mid-1870s and graduated in 1878. During his studies he worked as a draughtsman for several architects and builders, among them Josep Fontserè at the Parc de la Ciutadella. In 1878, the year he graduated, he met the industrialist Eusebi Güell, who became his most important patron and friend. He was influenced by the Catalan Renaixença movement, by medieval and Moorish architecture and by the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin.
Gaudí’s early works, such as Casa Vicens in Barcelona, are characterised by brightly coloured tiles and Moorish motifs. In 1883 he took over the building of the Sagrada Família, which he worked on for the rest of his life. For Güell he designed the town palace Palau Güell and the large garden city of Park Güell. Casa Batlló and Casa Milà, both from the first decade of the 20th century, have undulating façades, organic forms and roofs with sculptural chimneys. In the crypt for the Colonia Güell he developed hanging models with strings and weights to find self-supporting catenary curves. He used trencadís, a mosaic of broken tiles, and geometric forms such as paraboloids and hyperboloids.
Gaudí died in 1926 after being struck by a tram in Barcelona. The Sagrada Família was then far from finished, and work has continued for more than a hundred years with the help of his models and later computer calculations. His buildings in and around Barcelona are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and they have made the city one of Europe’s most visited architectural destinations. During the early decades of modernism he was often seen as an oddity, but later engineers and architects such as Frei Otto and many digital designers have seen him as a pioneer of form that follows the forces. His work with catenary curves and structural form is also studied in Swedish architecture and engineering education.