Gaudí y Cornet, Antonio

Gaudí y Cornet, Antonio (1852–1926). Catalan architect, he worked all his life in and around Barcelona, where he was part of the Renaixensa or renascence of Catalan patriotism, expressed in a strange and wilful architecture drawing on the Islamic and Gothic monuments of Spain. His first important work was the Casa Vicens (1878–85), Barcelona, a riotously polychrome villa in which the Gothic and Moorish themes were overtly expressed. This was followed by El Capricho (1883–5), a summer villa at Comillas, near Santander, again uninhibited in its exploitation of geometry and colour. His patron from the early 1880s was the industrialist Güell, for whom Gaudí designed the Palacio Güell in Barcelona (1885–9), an extraordinary and complex building its street façade reminiscent of a vaguely Venetian Gothic prototype, with parabolic arches and a roof embellished with tile-encrusted chimneys and ventilators. Tile-encrusted too were the serpentine seats of the Parque Güell (from 1900).

From 1883 Gaudí worked on the design of the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, which started as a Gothic structure, but was gradually transformed into a very free composition owing something to Gothic, but more to an imagination fired by Art Nouveau tendencies and the structural possibilities of parabolic forms and inclined piers. In order to evolve a structure in equilibrium, Gaudí designed catenary cord models with weights that transformed the hanging curves into funicular polygonal elements from which the masons could take measurements. Even more startling was the Modernismo apartment-block, the Casa Batlló (1904–6), a remodelling of an earlier structure, with a façade of bony stone uprights carrying free arched openings over which is a ceramic-faced front from which project mask-like balconies resembling human pelvic bones. More extreme is the Casa Milá (1906–10), a layered pile-up of inwardly inclining stone piers carrying I-beams between which spring tile vaults, the whole capped by a strange, surreal collection of tiled chimneys and ventilators. The internal planning avoids right-angled rooms, and the block is one of the most extraordinary creations of its time. He collaborated with Jujol on these and other projects.

In, 1998 it was proposed that Gaudí should be beatified, an unusual honour for an architect.

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