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Aside from the fact that Gaudí's style defies description, there is another peculiar property to his work: people either love it or hate it. I happen to love it. For this reason I made a special detour to Barcelona and spent a delightful week in this ancient city, where Gaudi is by no means the only attraction, chasing the capricious architecture of this favorite child of Catalonia.
To summarize Gaudí in a few words—as imaginative as they may be—is a tall task, but here goes: sculpted, wavy lines, rounded, turreted roofs, brilliantly colored, multi-patterned and textured surfaces, all brought together in a conglomerate fantasy that even Walt Disney would envy. After all, he only drew his fairy-tale castles, whereas Gaudí brought his imaginings into three-dimensional reality.
The undulating silhouettes and rounded roof lines conjure up childhood fantasies of little mushroom houses where tiny gnomes live. Where the lines of the walls seem to meander in a more or less regular pattern across the façades, the motion of the ocean and the rippled sands of the sea bottom seem to be depicted.
The profusely ornate walls, on the other hand, bring to mind images of storybook gingerbread houses or fancy cakes with colorful icing and mounds of whipped cream, carefully squeezed through a cake decorator's tools and placed on the tips of sugar cones, cascading in delicious heaps. The images are so real that you find yourself attempting to run a finger through the icing to extract its colorful whimsy and sample its sweetness.
Far from the delicate ingredients from the confectioner's art, Gaudí's materials were stone, concrete, wrought iron and broken, vividly colored glass and faience. Herein lies the perplexity and perfection of Gaudí's genius: implacable materials were made to respond to the master's touch to form wavy, circular, cascading and swooping lines and surfaces, thereby endowing the rigid elements with a breath of life.
Perhaps the best known and most monumental of Gaudí's works is the Church of the Sacred Family (Sagrada Familia), undoubtedly the greatest ecclesiastical structure erected in the past hundred years. The work on the cathedral began in 1884, and has continued, save for a spell during the World Wars, to the present day. Still not finished, the church is remarkable in its individuality of style and nobility of scale.
The edifice has eight openwork steeples, in two groups of four upon opposite ends. The central two of each group are taller, soaring disproportionately high above the façades. At the top, the steeples have whimsical finials, whose multi-planar surfaces a re covered with brilliantly colored mosaics of broken tiles. The outer walls of the nave are profusely sculpted, giving the cathedral a highly novel flavor. The Sagrada Familia is a spectacle and an inspiration, and presents a tantalizing statement of controversy over style and purpose, means and end.
Another remarkable monument to Gaudí's genius is the Güell Park, now the Municipal Park of Barcelona. A mostly landscaped park, it is also a study in architecture in that it includes several small buildings and subsidiary construction. It is a fascinating display of man and nature working together to create something that is strangely natural, yet convincingly contrived.
Tall structures, reminiscent of ruined colonnades or slanting tree trunks, support land masses or vaults, and are seemingly made of fragile rubble, but were, in fact, reinforced with iron rods according to a careful study of the forces involved.
Curving benches, incorporated in a low fence-like structure surrounding the great open terrace—presently closed and in dire need of restoration—are covered with mosaics of broken faience, and suggest the waves of the sea. The roof lines of the lodges, also sheathed in brilliant mosaics, complement the fairytale atmosphere with their fanciful steeples and botanical finials. A bizarre prehistoric shell creature serves as the fountain in the center of a large staircase near the entrance to the park. This is a glorious venue for cool morning or evening outings and strolls among its beautifully landscaped flower gardens and mysterious caves, passage ways and paths, and should rightly be called "Gaudi Kingdom."
One of Gaudí's major works, Casa Batllo, is actually a renovation of a small apartment building, carried out in 1905-07. Bulging balconies that resemble contoured masks from the Rococo period endow this edifice with the air of light-hearted theatrics. The "masks" were originally black, which made them even more focal than they are now in their newly-painted cream tints. The upper stories of the building glitter with broken glass mosaics, while the lizard skin-like pantiled roof with its high cock's comb profile actually conceals a roof-top terrace. A prominent steeple, adorned with its signature finial resembling a multidimensional cross, is hiding underneath a mound of cascading whipped cream-like form that reflects the warm sunshine.
Casa Mila, the largest of Gaudí's single buildings—save for the Sagrada Familia—conspicuously occupies a corner lot in the busy city center, a site that gives the edifice proper space to fully display its splendor. Locally known as La Pedrera (The Quarry), it looks like a grotesquely twisted block with its wavy façades. There does not seem to be one straight line; even the windows are curved, so that the whole block seems to be in constant motion. Carefully carved out of granite, the texture emulates naturally eroded surfaces. The only relief from the massive undulation is presented by the more delicate railings of the balconies. They, too, fit the marine theme with the twisted wrought-iron motifs that seem to have had their origin in stringy seaweed. As a whole, Casa Mila is most succesful in uniformity of style, offering even some symmetry, rare in Gaudi's vocabulary.
More symmetry, if somewhat hesitant, can be observed in one of Gaudí's earlier works, namely Casa Vicens, a house built for a tile manufacturer, in 1883-85. This building is one of the most predictable and colorful ones that Gaudí ever designed.
Obviously due to his client's profession, Gaudí used a profusion of brightly colored tiles in stead of their mere fragments as in other works. Colorful strips of floral tiles and rubble are layered on the walls, while bright blue- and-white checkerboard designs dominate among them. Delightful hints of the old, more geometric Moorish style, although jagged and freely interpreted, present in the colonnades, archways and the corbelled turrets over the corners, bring an air of Andalucia to Catalonia. In this project, Gaudí introduced a new concept into home- building: a double façade that serves as a buffer against street noises and a shade from the piercing Mediterranean sun.
In Casa Vicens, the use of wrought iron does not have quite the same visual importance as in Gaudí's later works. Here it appears more functional and does not contribute to the style of the building in a meaningful way. Present in window grills and balconies in more modest configurations, it seems to find its main purpose in the multilayered, floral-designed fence, which makes the house cohesive and unified in its setting. This completeness is further accentuated by matching planter pots, a fountain and outdoor lanterns.
While Antoní Gaudí appears an outsider in the world of architecture with his iconoclastic and unconventional means of expression—a lone genius shrouded in some sort of mysticism—he was revered by his contemporaries as a key personality in Catalonia's search for identity. He was, indeed, considered a true modernista and a prophet among his peers. He pointed the way for others to follow in intertwining the past with the future in order to create a vocabulary that would best express the ideas of the new, free-spirited and forward-looking generation of architects. ¡Bravo, Gaudí!
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This page was created on June 18, 1998
Most recent revision: March 3, 2007